A business transformation, when a company moves from traditional IT to modern IT, typically includes migrating to the cloud. The driving factor behind a business transformation varies from company to company, but it’s common to start a transformation in order to become more competitive in the marketplace, more digital, more reactive to customers, or more automated. Whatever your reason, there are four distinct phases you will go through during a business transformation, from the initial idea to ongoing optimization.
Phase 1: Getting started
The best place to start your transformation is with an in-depth business case. Depending on your goals, your business case will most likely include multiple elements, such as competitiveness, speed to market, and cost savings. Once you’ve determined your business case, it’s easier to understand your total cost of ownership in the cloud. It also provides structure to analyze compelling events and the moving parts around it, including contract terms and assets.
It’s important to bring all your key stakeholders together. We recommend following the Amazon Web Services Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) that incorporates six different perspectives from throughout the organization. These perspectives include business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. This practice gives you a chance to evaluate the skills in your central IT area, understand existing governance from your chief commercial officer (CCO), evaluate security needs, and invite discussion between platform engineers, among other benefits. There’s a learning curve when it comes to operations in the cloud, so it’s important to get these perspectives together often to review the strategy, revise where necessary, and voice concerns together.
Phase 2: Six months into the transformation
The most important thing to remember at this stage of your business transformation is to keep listening. Invite feedback from the workforce and your users as things begin and continue to evolve. Establish a strong Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), a multi-stakeholder group of subject matter experts from various areas of the business, to drive communication from the top down. This will help breed an environment of inclusiveness throughout the transformation to avoid barriers and maintain your timeline.
At this point, you’re getting more interaction with the cloud and it’s easy to get distracted by all the cloud native services available. Continue to focus on your business objectives first – there will be plenty of time and opportunity to modernize, implement new services, and monetize data along the way. Moving too quickly without sticking to the established governance can lead to cloud sprawl, high storage and backup costs, and other budget overages. Get through these initial phases first to make sure everyone has the cloud skills they need and understand that the IT organization is there to enable business first and foremost. Once these new skills have been mastered, you can encourage experimentation and move faster.
Phase 3: Nearing the finish line
During this ending phase, focus is less on the technology and tools and more on evolving. Technical teams are more effective and efficient and the workforce throughout the organization is getting smarter. Evolution within the cloud is speeding up among both legacy technicians and newer technicians who are cloud native. Observe these progressions among your technical team and be ready for change. It’s common to lose team members with experience to other organizations just beginning their own cloud transformation.
Avoid knowledge loss with strong governance around run books, automation, documentation, and a deep understanding of how systems and processes work in the cloud. This is important to avoid gaps associated with turnover and to support a comprehensive onboarding process as you train new employees. Processes that used to take two to three days are now happening in hours, with the goal of getting them down to minutes. As you move faster, don’t forget these important documentation steps to keep up with the speed of business for the long-term.
This is also an especially exciting phase because now you’re moving at a pace where you can experiment and fail fast. New opportunities are created to monetize incoming data and analysis for additional revenue streams. Automation in the architecture, solutions, and management let you pivot and react quickly. Things become repeatable and the tedious manual processes of the past are greatly reduced, if not eliminated completely.
Phase 4: Post transformation
Post transformation includes anything above and beyond the scope of the original transformation project, including continuous optimization – constantly incorporating new instance types, payment models, and other relevant technology as it becomes available for the cloud. Evaluate how your applications are working and decide which should be refactored into a cloud native environment or move toward containerization. Post transformation you should continue innovating, watching your costs, and taking advantage of new cloud products and services.
2nd Watch invites to embrace your business transformation with cloud technologies and our strategic and tactical approach. Guaranteeing quality, consistency, and completeness, our experts work with you to determine your objectives and create tailored services to help you meet them. Contact Us to see how best to meet your transformation goals.
-Chris Garvey, EVP of Product
