How can cloud transformation support your growth?

To get the most out of cloud demands a new way of running your organization – with a singular focus on outcomes.

In brief

• Are you actually transforming with cloud?
• Are you aligning cloud with business intimacy?
• Does your organization have the human skills, both technical and “soft”, to realize the benefits of cloud? 

To get the most out of cloud demands a new way of running your organization – with a singular focus on outcomes.

Over the last few years, organizations the world over have been working to move to the cloud. In 2022, 49% of respondents to EY Tech Horizon survey said cloud would have the biggest share of their investment over the next two years – and deliver the most value, in both cases second only to data and analytics.

There is a lot of talk about “living in the cloud” in terms of app management, services and applications. But that way of living is not compatible with legacy ways of running things. Because many organizations have found that, now they’re in the cloud, it still looks very much like being in a warehouse – just someone else’s. 

Living in the cloud means needing to continuously extend, reconfigure and evolve your architecture as well as your processes. And that requires some serious adaptation of your organization. Because to harness the cloud fully, you need to embed awareness of your business objectives and purpose deep within your technology teams, and then operationalize those objectives through the tech.  

Destination or journey?

Getting to the cloud, being in hybrid cloud or deploying cloud services – each of these are generally just the first step on the journey to business transformation enabled by cloud but are you actually transforming? Looking a bit closer still, cloud migration, modernization and implementation are in many cases not even the first step in a business transformation. They’re just putting the right shoes on.

Living in the cloud necessitates a transformation of your business. Managing business services in the cloud is not about solving tickets. Traditional operating models and matrices can’t respond fast enough in a digital world, where feedback comes in by the second. 

Many clients have adopted new platforms and capabilities, but not seen any benefits. This could be because outdated corporate structures inhibit growth and increase organizational resistance to change. And the siloed structure of some organizations obscures wider visibility. Take for example, a large telecommunications company that had a new cloud platform. For the engineers, everything looked fine in the control room. But out in the world, their streaming service was down – and they were due to broad cast a major football match. In thousands of pubs, fans were erupting with frustration. And the company was blissfully unaware until fans started to Tweet about it.

The lack of benefits is as much a human problem as it is a structural one though. EYTech Horizon survey 2022 found that 83% of respondents had a lack of resources and expertise in cloud, and Gartner has stated that “the cloud skills gap has reachedcrisis level in many organizations”  – identifying a shortage of not only technical cloud skills but “associated ‘soft skills’ and mindset.”

Develop business intimacy

In a 2022 survey by Flexera , 59% of respondents said optimizing the costs of their existing cloud was their top priority. But simply running technology economically is not an overarching objective for any organization. It’s not even the purpose of application management. 

What is the tech actually for? That’s a question that should trigger a drive for deeper business awareness in your teams – a deeper understanding of the outcomes that you, as a business, are reaching for. 

This is what we call “business intimacy”. Getting the business teams and technology teams aligned on a single objective. From there, you can kick-start cloud evolution on a daily basis and develop new and more skills around it. And those skills are critical – linking purpose to business strategy to business capabilities to strategic backlog, all within constrained investment cycles, is something the business teams and technology teams will need to master.

There’s also the question of governance structure. Tech teams are often free to make many decisions – but do they have real choice over vendors? Do they have a common view of the business case? Do they set the right objectives and KPIs for new investments? Do they track what’s been delivered? In DevOps and Agile, business owners are required to be intimately involved with the tech team. It should be the same with cloud.