Posted: Oct. 18, 2004

Reporting to Microsoft’s CIO are groups that provide services in one of three general categories:

Business application support. The business unit IT (BUIT) team consists of over 1,500 employees (half of whom are contractors or vendors) that support Microsoft’s business applications. These applications include large-scale, strategic business management software, such as SAP, and a large number of specialized, internally built applications that support day-to-day business activities, such as self-service access to human resources and financial data and many of Microsoft’s intranet sites.

Employee and infrastructure services. Four groups provide basic IT services for Microsoft employees and manage the infrastructure those services run on. These include groups that run Microsoft’s Exchange infrastructure (Messaging Services), support desktop software and hardware (Client Services), manage Microsoft’s data centers (Enterprise Services), ensure the security of the company’s electronic assets and intellectual property (Corporate Security), and run Microsoft IT’s data centers (Global Technology Services). Over 2,000 employees collectively reside in the five groups supporting these services; the largest of these teams, Client Services, contains over 1,000 employees, only 20% of whom are full-time Microsoft employees.

Internal IT services. Two smaller groups provide service to Microsoft's IT organization itself. The Technology Infrastructure Planning group plans and coordinates new Microsoft technology rollouts (i.e. Microsoft’s dogfood process); the Communications group oversees communication services for the organization, such as the IT group’s intranet site. Most workers in these groups are full-time Microsoft employees.