The Cloud Adoption Playbook

Proven Strategies for Transforming Your Organization with the Cloud

Moe Abdula, Ingo Averdunk, Roland Barcia, Kyle Brown, Ndu Emuchay

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119491859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cloud Computing
• Index: Computer Science

The essential roadmaps for enterprise cloud adoption

As cloud technologies continue to challenge the fundamental understanding of how businesses work, smart companies are moving quickly to adapt to a changing set of rules. Adopting the cloud requires a clear roadmap backed by use cases, grounded in practical real-world experience, to show the routes to successful adoption. The Cloud Adoption Playbook helps business and technology leaders in enterprise organizations sort through the options and make the best choices for accelerating cloud adoption and digital transformation.

Written by a team of IBM technical executives with a wealth of real-world client experience, this book cuts through the hype, answers your questions, and helps you tailor your cloud adoption and digital transformation journey to the needs of your organization. This book will help you:

• Discover how the cloud can fulfill major business needs
• Adopt a standardized Cloud Adoption Framework and understand the key dimensions of cloud adoption and digital transformation
• Learn how cloud adoption impacts culture, architecture, security, and more
• Understand the roles of governance, methodology, and how the cloud impacts key players in your organization.

Providing a collection of winning plays, championship advice, and real-world examples of successful adoption, this playbook is your ultimate resource for making the cloud work. There has never been a better time to adopt the cloud. Cloud solutions are more numerous and accessible than ever before, and evolving technology is making the cloud more reliable, more secure, and more necessary than ever before. Don't let your organization be left behind! The Cloud Adoption Playbook gives you the essential guidance you need to make the smart choices that reduce your organizational risk and accelerate your cloud adoption and digital transformation.

1
Business Drivers

The ongoing digital revolution affects individuals and businesses alike. Increasingly, social networks and digital devices are the default means for engaging government, businesses, and civil society, as well as friends and family members. People use mobile, interactive tools to determine who to trust, where to go, and what to buy. This means that the last best experience that people have anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere, including in the enterprise. Given the competitive landscape, this means that enterprises must undertake their own digital transformations, rethink what their customers value most, and create operating models that take advantage of what is newly possible for competitive differentiation.

The challenge for the enterprise is how fast and how far to go down the path to digital transformation and cloud adoption.

Addressing Challenges for the Enterprise

To meet this challenge, enterprises must develop a methodical approach to embracing digital transformation and the cloud. Developing that approach means that they must answer questions such as:

• How do we situate such transformation in the complexity of the enterprise itself and the regulatory environment in which the enterprise operates?
• What considered, integrated set of decisions should we make to ensure consistency and safety at scale?
• How do we ascertain what success looks like in the short term, as well as what steps we need to take in the long term to sustain it?

Increasing customer expectations and a more competitive business context have placed tremendous pressure on business leaders to change the way they set their strategies and run their organizations. New requirements to incorporate more information and greater interactivity quickly drive up costs and complexity.

Business leaders have long used information technology to improve productivity and efficiency, reach new markets, and optimize supply chains. What is new is that customer expectations have changed. How can enterprises best respond to this shift? How can they take advantage of the opportunity to innovate and grow through technology adoption? And how can they do all this cost-efficiently?

This is the domain of digital transformation and its intersection with cloud adoption. Digital transformation incorporates the change associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of society¹. Cloud Adoption is the way in which businesses implement digital transformation.

In our work with clients, we have found that enterprises that can develop and effectively execute a digital transformation strategy and take full advantage of new technologies, such as cloud are able to transform their business models and set a new direction for entire industries.

We believe the most crucial decision that a company can make to successfully pursue a digital transformation strategy is to wholeheartedly yet thoughtfully adopt the cloud as the IT platform of choice. We have observed many companies that have successfully used cloud adoption to rapidly advance their digital transformation strategy. We have also seen companies make unsuccessful cloud adoption decisions that have hampered or set back their pace of digital transformation. What we will show you in this book is how to model your decision-making process after the successful transformations while avoiding the common pitfalls we’ve seen in the unsuccessful transformations.

We propose to show you how to do this by focusing on three areas:

• Think and Envision the Transformation
• Balance the Transformation
• Thrive on New Foundations

Along with insights from our direct consulting work with many industry-leading organizations, the ideas we present in The Cloud Adoption Playbook (the Playbook) are underscored by influential works including The Three Laws of Performance, by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan²; The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen³; View from the Top, by Michael Lindsay⁴; and the transformation of IBM itself.

This Playbook is for those who are (or aspire to be) catalysts for digital transformation in their organizations; leaders who see the need for transformation as well as those who have direct responsibility for executing it. We intend to bridge the business and technology divide and provide a holistic but pragmatic set of ideas that can enable considered, consistent, and successful implementation within complex organizational constructs. We hope that this Playbook guides you in deciding how and where to get started in your digital transformation journey, what important dimensions to consider, and how to make integrated decisions that significantly improve the chances of success while reducing risk.

We have seen many cloud adoption and digital transformation programs succeed; we have also seen many fail. We hope that the tips in this Playbook will add to the body of knowledge and experience on replicating success and extending its impact.

What Drives a Business to the Cloud?

Technology in general, and the cloud specifically, are only a means to an end. The end needs to be defined in terms of a business or mission-strategic intent such as the following business drivers:

• Exceptional user experience
• Accelerated time to market
• Higher service quality
• Cost flexibility
• Repeatability and flexibility
• Safety, security, and compliance with regulation

Growing your business to meet these business drivers requires change and organizational transformation beyond just adoption of technology. To understand where cloud adoption and digital transformation fit within the enterprise, you have to place them within the context of very complex organizational constructs requiring a holistic approach. This approach needs to take into account the requirement to make progress and show success in the short term while keeping the long-term goals in sharp focus.

Because of this organizational complexity, we must define what success looks like in this context to show you what refinement looks like and to demonstrate how to achieve quick wins along the way. The following questions can help guide your organization in understanding this definition of success:

• What are our specific measures of success? Examples might include “Attract and retain top talent” or “Reduce IT delivery time by 15 percent.”
• What are some quick wins in the short term that the cloud could help us achieve? Examples might include “Conduct a workload and data classification analysis to determine what workloads have affinity to the cloud and migrate 5 percent of those to cloud within one year” or “Deliver a high-profile pilot cloud-native application that opens a new route for customer interaction, such as a native mobile app or artificial-intelligence chatbot.”
• What does sustainable success look like in the long term for our digital transformation journey? One example might be “Support idea to market rollout in less than one month.”
• What are the key success factors that our whole organization needs to understand and march toward? One example might be “Improve customer experience by 5 percent on a continuous basis as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS).”

Quick wins are powerful ways to secure and retain sponsorship. We have seen that companies gain more success over the long term when they build effective, enduring cloud transformation programs that aligned with their strategic intent and business drivers. We recommend that you take stock and periodically evaluate this alignment and course-adjust as necessary to achieve strategic outcomes.

We recognize that cloud technologies present an unprecedented potential for organizations to re-envision their relationship with information technology. But we also believe that the cloud is a catalyst to allow you to go well beyond re-envisioning to actual realization of new types of value. Cloud adoption can transform organizations by better empowering their workforces and ultimately differentiating them from competitors. Companies that can tap this potential become disruptors in their respective markets regardless of industry, which represents a real opportunity for leaders of these organizations.

We also recognize that given their successful history and ongoing commitments with their most valued clients, organizations adopting the cloud may experience first-hand the innovator’s dilemma. You have to strike a balance between two worlds: delivering on existing commitments to stakeholders employing traditional IT methods and tools, and simultaneously adopting the game-changing new technologies required to meet disruptive new business opportunities. All organizations must work out how far to go in each direction to decide what is right for them. In this Playbook, we provide practical approaches to the decisions that need to be made and ways to take action along the important decision-making dimensions we lay out.

What Do You Gain from Cloud?

According to the 2011 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition, “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

The practical outcomes that companies want to realize from cloud computing include resource elasticity, cost flexibility, and self-service provisioning....