14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
A well-executed cloud strategy should have eliminated large IT business cases. If your business is still building them, then you’re probably not realising full value from your cloud investment. Let’s look at the likely causes and what you can do to address them.
The Company Toll
Building large IT business cases for funding new technology services will drain agility for most organisations. It takes too long, the costs are eye-watering, and the results rarely match the promised benefits. It is, in a very real sense, a Company Toll.
But what choice do you have?
In earlier articles in this series, we mapped out what an alternative might look like. You can start by replacing your IT project delivery model with a product development model; hire talent with experience creating cloud products; introduce a cloud shared-responsibility model and fund incremental feature development with cloud business cases. These are key components of a well-functioning Cloud Operating Model that enable you to optimise your cloud investment, providing the agility your stakeholders expect of you.
If you have started to implement your Cloud Operating Model and you’re still building large IT business cases, then chances are the problem lies with other parts of your IT department still working under the old operating model. Even if your Cloud team is no longer contributing to the Company Toll, you cannot rid yourself of it until all IT teams have made the transition.
Operating cloud responsibly and intelligently
At this point, let’s take a moment to discuss how large IT business cases create a Company Toll and how moving to a Cloud Operating Model eliminates it.
The issue starts with stakeholder engagement. During the development of an IT business case, you will need to get quotes from impacted teams. For many teams, this is a perfect opportunity to correct past mistakes. For example, a team may have underquoted a previous engagement and now want to square their ledger.
Other teams may take the opportunity to purchase a fancy IT gizmo or platform they “need”. Some teams will simply provide go-away quotes because they just don’t want to do it.
This issue is compounded by the fact you’ll need to build in contingency accounting for every possible thing that may go wrong, as there will be limited opportunity to revisit the quote. You may even include a provision to account for two or three change requests – extra costs your technology partners will invariably present whenever you need to deviate from the original requirements.
As an aside, it is these issues that contribute to the eye-watering quotes that makes Shadow IT so attractive.
Creating enterprise-wide buy-in
Extending your well-functioning Cloud Operating Model to other IT teams can address the Company Toll. By introducing product management talent, these IT teams will want to offer features rather than technology gizmos. Introducing cloud business cases funds these teams to deliver features rather than use initiatives to square ledgers. By introducing a cloud shared responsibility model, these teams will be service providers attracting service users rather than turning them away.
We’re talking primarily about your network and security teams, followed by your managed service providers and on-premises teams. Shifting these teams will be a challenge for different reasons.
Your network and security teams will likely push back, explaining their domain is different to “cloud” and cannot possibly be provided on a self-serve, on-demand, pay-per-use basis. Your managed service providers, that make most of their profit via change requests will see pay-per-use as a challenge to their business model. Finally, some existing teams may see the Cloud Operating Model as a challenge to their empire, particularly the change in roles and responsibilities. We’ll address each of these issues in future articles.
Extending your Cloud Operating Model to other teams to eliminate the Company Toll is a significant undertaking. At DigiRen, we have years of experience building cloud solutions.
We specialise in building Cloud Operating Models that enable businesses to take advantage of their cloud investment. Extending the model requires experience and know-how. If you would like to learn more, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn.
The next article in this series explores the problem of the "Company Queue", a natural outcome of complex RACI's. Stay tuned...