14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Is there a wall dividing your DevOps team from your traditional IT team? Do the teams sit in different areas, use different tools, and seemingly speak different languages? Do they even look at each other with mutual mistrust and suspicion? If so, then your cloud strategy could be at risk. It’s important to resolve this quickly before it impacts the ability of your IT organisation to respond to changing business demands.
Introducing new technology into an organisation will always present challenges, particularly when it concerns upskilling, ongoing support, and cloud technology. This can completely transform team roles and responsibilities and may ultimately create hurdles for your business.
Previously, we’ve discussed the need for new types of teams, Product IT teams, with a specific talent profile, along with introducing a Cloud Shared Responsibility Model to explain the new responsibilities.
These – among other changes – are needed to ensure your cloud migration is successful.
A case for change
However, it is not enough to introduce new technology, new team structures, and new ways of working and expect to immediately reap the benefits. Before all this, you must first make the case for change and build confidence and support for the move. The case for change must be consistent with your overall cloud strategy and help answer questions such as: Why should teams adopt cloud? How will they benefit? Will it help individuals with their career path, will it increase work satisfaction, and will it help them build a profile within the organisation? Will this take us to where we need to be?
Why is there division?
If your teams are still divided between DevOps and traditional IT, then chances are you have not made the case for change.
You can test this by asking some simple questions: do your traditional IT teams look at cloud services like AWS, Azure & GCP and see just another data centre? Do they complain that the DevOps teams just don’t understand the need for approvals, for a detailed RACI, for operational support? On the other hand, do your DevOps teams complain that the traditional IT teams are just too slow, can’t change and don’t know how modern IT works?
An IT department split like this may start to become a burden rather than an asset to the rest of your business. You will be forced to decide between the old and the new. Moreover, your business will see different results depending on which type of team you champion.
Uniting your DevOps and IT teams
To successfully move forward, it is important to revisit the reasons you adopted your cloud strategy in the first place. Remind yourself of the cloud value proposition - self-service, on-demand, pay-per-user and what this can do for your business - the ability to respond quickly to changing market circumstances as well as test new ideas without the need for a large business case or significant investment.
To materialise these benefits, your organisation will need to implement all the elements of the Cloud Operating Model we have discussed in this series: product development, product IT teams, cloud user journey, cloud business case, cloud shared responsibility model, cloud metrics and DevOps.
These elements will pose different challenges to different parts of your organisation. We have discussed the potential impact on network & security teams and reimagining them as service providers, promoting your technology owners from gatekeepers to product owners and finally implementing a migration journey for your traditional IT teams.
As well as revisiting your cloud strategy and before you set about implementing the elements of your Cloud Operating Model, you must address the divisions in your organisation by initiating a cloud change program.
The change program is an important component of your strategy and will allow you to:
provide transparency and explain to the rest of your organisation how the changes will benefit the business,
build the support you will need to align all parts of your IT organisation around your cloud strategy,
address lingering questions and potential pushback about your new Cloud Operating Model.
A successful cloud strategy requires leadership and an actionable cloud change program that encompasses your entire IT and business organisation and supports your people to engage, understand, adopt, and utilise new ways of working.
At DigiRen, we have years of experience building cloud solutions. We specialize in building Cloud Operating Models that enable businesses to take advantage of their cloud investment. If you would like to discuss how we might help, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn.