The Checklist of Cloud Adoption for Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is more than simply digitizing data. It requires evolving from rigid, legacy platforms to an IT environment that is designed to adapt to the changing needs of an organization. It calls for innovation, in addition to changes in policy, procurement, talent, and culture, to take full advantage of new opportunities that come with new breakthrough technologies.

Enterprise around the world is embracing the cloud to deliver services faster to Business Units and to their new business development. At the same time, this transformation can help them better cope with budgetary and human resource constraints.

This content offers a checklist of strategies and tactics Enterprises worldwide are using to break down innovation barriers and tackle mission-critical operations with the cloud.

Transforming Vision

 

True digital transformation employs an innovative approach—one that combines technology and organizational processes for developing and delivering new services. This requires a clear vision of where to start. Active participation in the definition of a cloud strategy makes it easier to implement new ideas on an ongoing basis.

Establishing a new mindset is also critical in the digital transformation process. Updating technologies is not enough. To improve citizen engagement and staff productivity, and accelerate service delivery, this change is essential across all levels of the organization. It’s about rethinking the approach, and how new technology can help it materialize. An agile development environment, cultural shift, and the right technology model can help enterprises further their modernization efforts.

 

Checklist

• Communicate a vision for what success looks like.
• Define a clear governance strategy, including the framework for achieving goals and the decision-makers responsible for creating them.
•   Build a cross-functional team to execute activities that support the strategy and goals.
• Identify technology partners with the expertise to help meet these goals.
• Move to a flexible IT system that supports rapid change.

 

Shifting Culture

The idea of change can be daunting. To successfully navigate a digital transformation, it is imperative to reshape the culture accordingly. This starts with shifting the organizational structure from traditional hierarchies and silos to smaller teams that are empowered to make decisions. Collaboration between development staff, IT, and other strategic units eliminates the “throw it over the wall” mentality and can ultimately translate to improved public service. 

Note To keep up with the changes in technology, it’s important to build an IT workforce that understands the latest trends and help them stay ahead of inherent learning curves.

Innovation works best with a bottom-up approach, where incentives are structured to recognize teams, rather than individuals. And by rewarding experimentation, you can remove barriers and eliminate the fear of failure. To drive cultural change, do the following:

 

Checklist

• Reorganize staff into smaller teams to empower decision-making.
• Train staff on new policies and best practices.
• Give permission to deviate from traditional rules.
• Build a cloud development environment that exists as a place to play and build confidence with new skills.
• Shift to a short-term planning mindset and continuously iterate on the plan (agile project management).
• Consider hiring consultants to help with initial projects.

 

Change the Cost Model

 

Small budgets can drive innovation because teams will take creative steps to build new processes to address problems. Cloud services can positively impact cost with the ability to modernize infrastructures without substantial capital investments.

Circumventing the long, up-front procurement process makes it possible to undertake more projects through immediate access to compute resources. In addition, cloud computing provides the option to spin up and spin down instances, to accommodate seasonal services and dev/test cycles while only paying for the compute resources that you use.

Approach the cost model incrementally. Start with cost containment, shift to cost avoidance, and then focus on cost reduction. With a pay-per-use model, it’s possible to return the long-term budget back to the organization and reallocate funds to new projects.

Go Cloud Native

While some organizations prefer to initially move individual licenses and projects to the cloud, others opt for a cloud-native approach. Developing and running applications in this manner takes full advantage of the cloud computing model. And by using DevOps processes that promote collaboration across small teams, it’s possible to accelerate the delivery of new services with greater reliability.

DevOps tools provide sustainable processes through infrastructure automation, continuous integration and delivery, monitoring, and auto remediation. With a DevOps model, it is possible to eliminate disparate development stovepipes and drive efficiencies.

Checklist

• Adopt the philosophy of a cohesive unit across developers and operations, and quality assurance and security functions.
• Encourage an ownership mindset throughout the entire development and infrastructure lifecycle, irrespective of roles.
• Provide your team with standardized DevOps tools and training.
• Build a unified code repository.
• Add built-in security.
• Perform frequent but small updates to remain agile and make deployment less risky.
• Create an automated solution (drives consistency, regardless of workflow or service).
• By adopting a DevOps model, organizations have more flexibility to experiment and develop solutions to long-standing challenges, creating a culture that enables future innovation.

Track Progress

 

During the digital transformation journey, it is essential to establish metrics to track progress. With early indicators in place, it’s possible to take immediate action if something goes wrong or needs to be corrected.

Checklist

• Create a data-driven metrics system.
• Evaluate improvements and progress toward goals.
• Assess whether the organization is planning and delivering consistently on goals within specified timeframes.

 

Data-Driven Accelerate Innovation

 

Cloud services consist of innovation that has long been embraced by the startup community. They are now joined by governments who seek to power innovative solutions for large societal problems. As Enterprise data becomes more open, connected, and widely available, more people can use AWS compute and big data analysis services to tackle problems that were, until recently, exclusively the domain of enterprise projects. Developers and curious staff are more equipped than ever to find forward-thinking and new solutions to some of the whole business’s biggest challenges.

Create the Environment for Digital Transformation

 

Drawing from my own experience as a cloud transformation pioneer, I help guide organizations toward techniques and tools to create a forward-leaning digital enterprise. But cloud computing is only half of the answer—the other half comes from an organization’s commitment to making a change.

So, what else should Enterprise be thinking about on the road to digital transformation? The following sections provide a framework for leveraging Cloud services in your organization.

Deliver an Exceptional User Experience

 

High user satisfaction results from ready access to information, when and wherever needed. However, a user experience should start with its own staff.

Self-service web applications enable your users to find information without human intervention, regardless of time zone or operating hours. For example:

• Staff can conduct business on their time, remove dependence on service centers with long waiting periods to reach representatives.
• Employees gain access to convenient, on-demand information from any location, which makes it easy to share data with coworkers.
• Enterprise can leverage expertise from each BU and other tech/non-tech partners to accelerate innovation with new services.
• Organizations can collect, analyze, and predict trends based on how web services are used.

With a flexible system, it’s no longer a hassle to modify services to better meet

the demands of users.

Collaborate for Improved Worker Productivity

 

Staff can quickly achieve business goals by leveraging experience across multiple organizations. By facilitating real-time communication to share information between teams, efficiency increases. In addition, the sharing of information fosters a culture of trust and innovative thinking. And with improved access to information, workers are able to make better-informed decisions to achieve business results.

 

Checklist

• Pool limited resources to reduce cost and redundant efforts.
• Evaluate whether incremental changes produce higher-quality results.
• Be specific about how to improve communication

 

Expedite New Service Delivery

 

Speed and agility have become basic requirements for conducting business. Today, enterprises must design flexibility into new services from the start to make it easy to adapt as the mission evolves. This is also paramount for transforming IT infrastructure. Moving to an on-demand computing environment delivers the requisite flexibility and scalability to support a collaborative work environment.

This approach minimizes costs and reliably adapts resources to meet the needs of the business.

Global Reach

By combining expertise across the organization to work on common problems, organizations around the globe can share best practices, take advantage of economies of scale to reduce costs, provide better quality, deliver more effective services, and reduce risk.

How CADX  Delivers

Enterprises are leading the way in driving innovation for their business. The cloud offers not only cost savings and agility, but also the opportunity to develop breakthroughs in staff engagement.

Whether through data analytics initiatives, application modernization, workflow reform, service improvements, or infrastructure programs, more organizations are increasingly turning to the CADX framework for cloud adoption to provide the cost-effective, scalable, secure, and flexible infrastructure necessary to transform.

With a focus on delivering value from dollars, all levels of enterprise look to manage costs while maintaining the performance and increasing business require. In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are just a click away. This reduces the time it takes to make those resources available to developers from weeks to just minutes. Trimming cost and time for experimentation and development result in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization.

With cloud computing, it’s not necessary to make large upfront investments in hardware or in time spent managing it. Instead, it’s possible to provide exactly the right type and size of computing resources necessary to test new ideas or operate the IT department. You can access as many resources as needed, almost instantly, and only pay for what gets used.

Key Takeaway

Digital transformation requires strong leadership to drive change, as well as a clear vision. Organizations are experimenting with and benefiting from cloud technology to achieve digital transformation. The result of this transformation is a more resilient and innovative enterprise that can deliver services to users through the medium they now demand and can help retain innovative talent within the organization.

Whether it is transforming how individuals collaborate, or the way in which organizations execute large-scale processes, digital transformation offers significant upside for all enterprises, regardless of their size or mission.