14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Has your team of cloud experts built a beautifully automated CI/CD pipeline that can deploy well-architected infrastructure to the cloud in minutes, but no one is using it? In this article, we will explore how the make-up of your cloud team may be hindering your attempts to expand usage of your landing zones.
No doubt your new cloud landing zone – or new iPaaS middleware or SaaS-based identity service – was built by your IT organisation. Your IT organisation has a well-defined project delivery model for introducing new services into the business, including operational integration points and a standard operating model based on existing ITSM principles.
To complete the landing zone, or iPaaS or identity service, the IT organisation will have employed a team of cloud practitioners; expert architects, developers, and operation staff, to build and operate the solution.
Using cloud services to build and operate solutions is what these experts know and love. They can talk for hours explaining how they architected a particular capability using a cutting-edge cloud feature or how its implementation was guided by the need for redundancy, or for speed, or some other factor.
But there is a drawback. For the most part, these experts won’t be able to explain:
1) the problem their solution attempts to solve
2) why they built a particular capability
3) how to use their solution (at least not in all cases).
This is not their job. They built the solution according to the requirements. And because these requirements probably reflect how IT projects have always been delivered, chances are your new cloud service is hiding behind layers of IT process, such as an ITSM tool, SecOps-enforced feature restrictions, and possibly, the cloud team itself.
Consequently, no one is using your service.
Can this situation be salvaged? Yes, it can, but it will require new talent and a different delivery model.
To start, the talent should have an incentive to challenge existing IT processes and delivery models in order to expose the self-serve, on-demand, and pay-per-use value propositions of cloud computing to your potential customers.
Further, the talent should have a knack for explaining how to use the service; why different features are valuable and take feedback on problems with the service.
In other words, product management talent. Expanding just a little, you should be looking for product management, technical product management, and financial management talent, responsible for, respectively, engaging customers, designing features, and ensuring feature development is financially viable.
Since they are joining the cloud team, the talent should have a clear preference for delivering self-serve, on-demand, pay-per-use products and features.
With this new talent, you will have a team that will want to replace your IT project delivery model with a product delivery model, incorporating industry standards such as agile, DevOps, and human-centred design.
You will also have a team ready to take on the next set of challenges: training traditional IT teams to deliver cloud-native applications, re-designing business cases to take advantage of the pay-per-use nature of cloud, and reducing stakeholder overhead by simplifying responsibility matrices. We will explore these challenges in future articles.
Introducing product management talent will help your Cloud team re-imagine your cloud landing zone and make it more appealing to your customers. 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. Introducing a product development model is an important component of a successful Cloud Operating Model and if you would like to learn more, please contact us solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn
The next article in the series, 'Sign #3: Everyone has their cloud certs, but no-one is building cloud apps’, explores the skills, mindset and energy required to take advantage of the self-serve, on-demand, pay-per-use nature of cloud computing, and the importance of leadership and positive re-enforcement.