Taking on a business transformation to the cloud can seem like a huge endeavor, but it’s a necessary strategy for any modern business organization that wants to create a competitive advantage. Understanding some basics and common challenges before diving into your transformation can alleviate your concerns.
What is a business transformation?
A business transformation is any move from traditional, legacy IT to modern IT. The business is trying to become more competitive in the market, more digital, more reactive to customers, and more automated. Today, that typically includes a migration to the cloud.
Why do you want to transform?
When considering a business transformation, you need to know why you’re making the move. What is causing the need for your business to transform? Often times it’s your board putting on the pressure or a race to cloud because “everyone else is.” Those reasons can be motivators, but you need to take a step back and ask yourself, “What is the outcome I’m trying to achieve?”
If you’re only taking on a transformation to satisfy your board or keep up with peers, you haven’t clearly defined end objectives and won’t be successful in effectively and efficiently galvanizing outcomes. You need to understand your business needs and drivers and assess your ability to compete from a technology or digital standpoint. For example, if your business isn’t agile enough to meet customer demands, sales might be shrinking. In that case, new ways to interact with customers is the desired outcome. Moving to the cloud enables businesses to deliver services faster, and the transition facilitates that outcome.
Always keep your eye on delivering value. A business transformation to the cloud can help your business be more competitive, save costs, innovate, accelerate your time to market, and modernize, but the entire organization will need to mold and adapt as well. Consider how those outcomes will be achieved and where the business will be affected before beginning your transformation.
Understanding transformational challenges
The real challenges to a successful business transformation are usually organizational. It’s essential that leadership buys in from the top down. The board needs to understand how you’re going to accomplish their goal of getting into the cloud and what the outcomes will be as a result. These transformations can last years and require resources that need to be accounted for. Managers need to know how to train staff, and departments will need to alter their processes and procedures. Often times, businesses focus on avoiding technology challenges, but people-oriented problems can create bigger barriers to reaching your goals.
That is why a business transformation must be inclusive of everyone in the organization, because everyone will be affected. These changes are ongoing and there will be multiple phases of transition before the final implementation. Make sure you’re communicating regularly and clearly, from your initial migration assessment through migrating, running in the cloud, and adjusting to the new normal.
Gaining stakeholder support before and during the transformation can prevent the common problem of taking on too much too soon. Focus on a progression to transformation rather than implementing as many cloud services as possible right away. It can be overwhelming trying to get everyone in the organization to DevOps, containerize everything, use every micro service and modernize to cloud native. Instead, identify where you can get the biggest impact. It’s about providing the best services to your business units and speeding them along.
COVID-19: Unpredictable business transformation
While best practices tell you to spend a significant amount of time planning and implementing a business transformation, the COVID-19 pandemic thrusted businesses worldwide into a rapid transformation we never expected or planned for. The requirement for businesses to send their employees home to work remotely put a spotlight on everything from IT security and file sync and share to disaster recovery and business continuity.
As in any business transformation, an unpredictable transformation forces you to define where the business value lies. Some projects can be put on hold without a huge impact to the business, while others, specifically those supporting profits, must be accelerated. Remote work enablement, for example, is paramount to most businesses operating successfully during the pandemic. Organizations that previously used virtual workspaces already had the infrastructure in place to quickly establish at-home workers. More traditional businesses, those who hadn’t yet modernized, needed to first deploy those setups in order to not just continue business immediately, but also be ready for whatever comes next.
Whether it’s a well-planned, multi-year business transformation, implementation of a new service, or an unexpected demand to transform, your business must be ready for change. Our Business Transformation experts can help you create and execute strategic IT initiatives that support business transformation and deliver the right insights and services to ensure your success. Contact Us to discuss beginning your business transformation.
-Chris Garvey, EVP, Product
