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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 381
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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The Cloud Adoption Playbook
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Who This Book Is For
Sports Analogies or the Lack Thereof
What to Expect in Our Playbook
Notes
1 Business Drivers
Addressing Challenges for the Enterprise
What Drives a Business to the Cloud?
What Do You Gain from Cloud?
Implications to the Enterprise
Summary
Notes
2 Framework Overview
The Framework
Ten Key Actions of the Framework
Summary
Note
3 Strategy
What Does a Cloud Strategy Mean for the CIO?
What Do We Really Mean by “Strategy”?
Developing a Cloud Strategy
What Are the Complete Dimensions of a Cloud Strategy?
What Key Considerations Should a Cloud Strategy Address?
What Prescriptive Steps Are Required to Develop a Cloud Strategy?
Summary
Notes
4 Culture and Organization
What Does the Cloud Mean for Human Resources?
What Do We Really Mean by “Culture”?
Basic Squad Organization
Advantages of a COC
Summary
Note
5 Architecture and Technology
What Does Cloud Adoption Mean for Enterprise Architects?
Role of Enterprise Architects in Cloud Adoption
Example Microservices Reference Architecture
Reference Implementations
Summary
6 Security and Compliance
What Does the Cloud Mean to the CISO?
Will My People, Processes, Tools, and Approaches Change?
How Is Cloud Adoption Affected by Compliance Issues?
How Do I Protect Against Data Breaches and Loss?
How Do I Protect Against Networking Vulnerabilities?
What Does a Secure Cloud-Native System Look Like?
Identity and Access Management for Applications
Secure DevOps
How Do I Get Visibility to My Cloud Applications?
Summary
Note
7 Emerging Innovation Spaces
Innovation as a Business Driver
Examples of Innovation
Summary
Notes
8 Methodology
What Does the Cloud Mean for the VP of the VP of Method & and Tools?
Introducing the IBM Cloud Garage Method
Connections between Cloud and Agile
Lean Startup and Lean Development
Why Design Thinking Is the Missing Link
Starting a Project with the IBM Cloud Garage Method
Wrapping Up the Workshop
Our Approach to Project Inception
Starting Development
The Role of Technology Choices
Expanding to Deliver the MVP
The Role of Testing in the Squad Model
Customer Example
Summary
Notes
9 Service Management and Operations
What Does Cloud Mean for the VP of Operations?
Operational Transformation
New Roles
Operational Readiness
Incident Management
Root-Cause Analysis and Postmortems
Deployment, Release Management, and Change Management
Configuration Management
Summary
Notes
10 Governance
Cloud Challenges
Aspects of a Governance Model
Defining a Governance Model
Summary
Conclusion
Keep Calm and Adopt Cloud Successfully
An Open Invitation
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 6
Table 6-1: Authentication Models for Cloud-Native Applications
Chapter 9
Table 9-1: Example RACI Matrix
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure I-1: Technology Adoption Curve.
Chapter 2
Figure 2-1: Framework themes.
Figure 2-2: Dimensions of adoption.
Figure 2-3: Steps in the adoption journey.
Chapter 3
Figure 3-1: Cloud as a crucible for business transformation.
Figure 3-2: Summary view of Important dimensions of cloud strategy.
Figure 3-3: Developing a cloud strategy.
Figure 3-4: Cloud service types.
Figure 3-5: Cloud deployment models.
Figure 3-6: Hybrid enterprise.
Figure 3-7: Workload and data assessment.
Figure 3-8: Workload and data disposition.
Figure 3-9: Value-stream mapping.
Figure 3-10: Client long-term cloud adoption and digital transformation road map.
Figure 3-11: Proven approach in a spectrum of choices and decision-making.
Figure 3-12: Each organization is unique.
Chapter 4
Figure 4-1: Basic squad organization.
Figure 4-2: Support squads.
Figure 4-3: Tribe and guild organization.
Chapter 5
Figure 5-1: Workload strategies.
Figure 5-2: Application strategy.
Figure 5-3: Deployment style.
Figure 5-4: Cloud location.
Figure 5-5: Architecture Styles and Aspects.
Figure 5-6: Resiliency of microservices.
Figure 5-7: Monolithic architecture versus microservices architecture.
Figure 5-8: Microservices reference architecture.
Figure 5-9: Reference implementation.
Figure 5-10: Development stack.
Figure 5-11: Deployment options.
Figure 5-12: Continuous build and deployment.
Chapter 6
Figure 6-1: Secure cloud-native application architecture.
Chapter 8
Figure 8-1: IBM Garage Method.
Figure 8-2: IBM Design Thinking Loop.
Figure 8-3: Modeling as-is scenarios.
Figure 8-4: Prioritizing ideas.
Figure 8-5: Garage Method iteration cycle.
Chapter 9
Figure 9-1: Organizational change.
Figure 9-2: Process change.
Figure 9-3: Technology changes.
Figure 9-4: Cultural changes.
Figure 9-5: DevOps squad model.
Figure 9-6: DevOps squad model with operational squad.
Figure 9-7: DevOps squad model with SRE squad model.
Figure 9-8: SRE guild model.
Figure 9-9: Automation maturity.
Figure 9-10: Advanced tool chain for incident management.
Figure 9-11: Reference architecture for incident management.
Figure 9-12: Example of a postmortem summary.
Chapter 10
Figure 10-1: Vision for the Cloud COC.
Figure 10-2: Cloud COC general functions.
Figure 10-3: Guild cross-cutting tribes and squads.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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E1
The Cloud Adoption Playbook
Proven strategies for transforming your organization with the cloud
Moe AbdulaIngo AverdunkRoland BarciaKyle BrownNdu Emuchay
Foreword
By Steve Robinson, GM, IBM Hybrid Cloud
Over five years ago I took the opportunity to lead a startup team within IBM, which included some of the authors of this book, to develop a product that we thought would disrupt the industry. That product became IBM Bluemix PaaS, which is now at the heart of IBM Cloud. It certainly required disruption within IBM, as we had to build the product in ways that were transformational and new to us. It required us to move away from traditional models, and to learn how to develop natively for the cloud. We knew we had to embrace this new way of working to meet our clients' changing needs.
What I heard over and over again from our clients was that they needed to drive their own disruption, otherwise they risked being disrupted. If they didn’t accelerate their own innovation, then a handful of programmers may just do it for them. They saw how agile organizations are disrupting industries and leaving established players in their wake like yesterday's business model. They knew they needed to innovate faster and bigger, at enterprise scale, to reap the benefits of industry disruption and market change.
For any enterprise, it was evident, change was inevitable. Transformation leveraging cloud as an underpinning of a new digital business was a requirement to survive. Understanding how best to adopt cloud leveraging tried and tested techniques was key to accelerating such transformation.
The challenge enterprises face is making this real. How do they accelerate innovation like a startup, have clear line of sight to users, and scale to the enterprise? Clients turned to us and asked how we transformed ourselves, and how we can help them do the same. They heard that we adopted agile and DevOps practices broadly with impressive results in velocity, and they wanted to know our secret sauce.
This need in the marketplace for enterprise transformation was the impetus for me to form another startup team (again with many of the authors of this book) focused on developing a different way of consulting with our clients. We became the IBM Cloud Garage.
Supported by proven methods and hardened architectures, the Garage captures the essence of a digital economy: maniacal focus on the client experience, minimum viable products with rapid iterations, modernization of existing systems, and equal emphasis on culture, processes, and tools.
When we opened the doors of the IBM Cloud Garage, we applied similar practices for our enterprise clients, showing them how to harness the energy of a startup culture and apply it to their organizations at scale. We’ve helped executives and developers alike achieve a culture of continuous innovation — resulting in faster delivery, time to market, and customer satisfaction.
What this group has done combines industry best practices on IBM Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile Development, and DevOps to help enterprise organizations adopt the cloud and accelerate all phases of the application design, development, and delivery lifecycle. This book captures that secret sauce of the Garage and the Cloud Architecture and Solution Engineering team into one reference, and shows you how to make the cloud real in an enterprise.
Steve Robinson
General Manager, Client Technical Engagement
IBM
Introduction
In a very real sense, the cloud is ubiquitous. We would find it hard to believe that there’s a single reader of this book who doesn’t consume some type of cloud service. Whether it be a cloud music service like Apple Music or Spotify, or cloud storage such as Dropbox, or a Software as a Service (SaaS) application like Salesforce running on the cloud, cloud services touch all our lives.
But these examples are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Cloud technologies such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are redefining how Information Technology (IT) organizations develop and deliver solutions to their customers. If you’re an IT professional and you are not using the cloud in one of these ways already, you soon will be.
Who This Book Is For
Ever since Beal and Bohlen1 defined the technology diffusion process in 1957, technologists have divided up the different waves of technology adopters into four different groups: Early Adopters, Early Majority, Majority (or Late Majority), and Laggards (or Non-Adopters). Those groups are often represented as different quartiles of a normal distribution or bell curve, as Figure I-1 shows2. Geoffrey Moore, in his classic book Crossing the Chasm, informed us that not all technologies make it past the Early Adopter stage; there’s a large gap, or a “chasm” between Early Adopters and the Early Majority.
Figure I-1: Technology Adoption Curve.
What we can state, with finality, is that the cloud has made it past the technology adoption chasm. In a 2017 Forbes article3, Louis Columbus quoted from an Intel survey that showed fully 80 percent of all IT budgets would be committed to cloud applications and solutions. The cloud has now clearly moved beyond the early adopters into the two majority quartiles.
That fact is what drove us to write this book. In our customer-facing work we have seen that the vast majority of IT departments, in all industries, are now facing the problem of deciding how to adopt cloud technologies, and are somewhere in the process of formulating strategies and approaches for how to go about changing their organizations to handle this new set of technologies. But what we have seen is that the process of formulating a successful cloud adoption strategy, and what’s more, the process of implementing that strategy is not at all easy. What we will do in this book is show you how we have worked with many of the successful early adopters of the cloud and tell you their stories and share the lessons we have learned in working with them.
But we’re not only writing this book to speak to the early majority and late majority of cloud adopters; we’re writing it for a more specific audience — the enterprise audience. Our definition of an enterprise is simple; we mean a business that is not in the business of IT. So by this we exclude technology startups, which live in a different ecosystem and often work by different rules. If you are looking for tips and techniques on using the cloud to find your next round of venture capital, you’re looking in the wrong place. However, if you work for an Insurance Company, a Bank, a Manufacturer, a Retailer, or any of the thousands of other businesses that use IT but aren’t defined by IT, then you’re a member of our core audience. The size of your business doesn’t matter; we’ve worked with both large and small enterprises, and even startups, but the lessons that we present will be specifically tailored to helping you reach out to your most important stakeholders; your customers, both internal and external and transform that relationship to be more productive, responsive, and forward-looking by using the cloud as part of a larger ongoing digital transformation.
So whether you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of an enterprise, or if you report to them in a more specific capacity such as Enterprise Architect, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Director of Engineering, or Director of Operations, this book is for you. In fact, we have written our chapters to speak specifically to each of those roles, as you will see later on. But this book is not only aimed at the C-Suite; if you work as a team member for any of the roles named above, you’ll also gain valuable insight on how cloud will affect your job by reading this book.
Sports Analogies or the Lack Thereof
We have named this book The Cloud Adoption Playbook. There are two reasons for this; first, we’re following in the footsteps of our friend and colleague Sanjeev Sharma, who wrote the DevOps Adoption Playbook in 2017. This book can be considered a companion volume to that book, as the two are complementary. You don’t need to read Sanjeev’s book to gain from this book but if you do read his book, and we recommend you do, you will learn a lot about many of the same subjects from a different perspective.
But the second reason is that we call this a playbook for the same reason that Sanjeev called his book a playbook. We’re both drawing from the sports analogy where a playbook (in either basketball or American football) is the book that contains the plans and actions that a team carries out during a game.
Unlike Sanjeev’s book, we’re going to go super-light on the sports analogies; in fact, you’ll not find another sports analogy beyond the introduction. But we do want to tell a story about an early sports playbook that inspired us. Glenn Scobey (Pop) Warner was an early American football coach that pioneered many of the precursors of modern American football plays. Much of his most innovative work was done at the tiny Carlisle Indian Industrial School where he was football coach at the turn of the 20th century. He was an expert at poring through the rulebooks and finding creative ways to bend the rules of football to allow his team to “punch above their weight”. As a result, his team was able to beat teams from much larger colleges such as Columbia and Penn.
Warner’s spirit of innovation is what inspired us. Cloud technologies and digital transformation hold the same promise; they can allow smaller enterprises to “punch above their weight” and can help make larger enterprises more nimble and agile. But sometimes you have to bend a few rules, or at least change the way in which your enterprise has traditionally done things in order to make that happen. Finding ways of dealing with the constant tension between innovation and the realities of working inside an enterprise will be one of the ongoing themes of this book.
What to Expect in Our Playbook
In Chapter 1, we will discuss the business drivers that lead enterprises to adopt cloud, as well as how elevated customer expectations drive new requirements that force you to the cloud. We will discuss how highly competitive environments are forcing organizations to move more quickly, and how the evolving regulatory-requirements landscape is also forcing change into existing organizations.
In Chapter 2, we will present an overview of our cloud adoption and transformation framework: its themes, the important dimensions along which an enterprise can gauge where it is and where it needs to be, and how it enables you to take a structured, holistic, and pragmatic approach to cloud adoption.
In Chapter 3, we will share our experience in developing a cloud adoption strategy, presenting the key attributes of such a strategy and providing a prescriptive approach to developing your own strategy. We will share examples of how other companies have developed such strategies and discuss the components of successful cloud adoption strategies.
In Chapter 4, we will focus on how cultural change is the basis for success with the cloud. Often, our clients tell us that cultural change is the most important and challenging aspect of cloud adoption and digital transformation. Culture directly relates to the most critical asset of your organization: your people.
In Chapter 5, we will describe a viewpoint on architecture and technology, showing you how new cloud platforms, service types, and programming models (such as microservices) offer potential competitive advantages. More importantly, we’ll show you how to strike a balance between developing “architecture for architects” and how to communicate in the language of the developer.
In Chapter 6, we will discuss security, risk, and compliance. New technology approaches introduced by the cloud such as pooling and sharing of resources, new deployment models, and multivendor arrangements, mean that we must think differently about security, risk, and compliance. We’ll show you how to take steps to keep up with rapid innovation while providing a safe, secure, and compliant environment for business.
In Chapter 7, we will discuss several technologies and trends that are having a profound effect on business and the technology platforms that support them. These emerging technologies are changing the nature of services available to your users. By the very nature of innovation, the only constant is change and learning how to deal with that change is the central theme of the chapter.
In Chapter 8, we will explore the IBM Cloud Garage Method that we have codified and refined over many client engagements and in our internal development at IBM. These codified insights and best practices are the keys to rapidly scaling an organization’s capabilities. We’ll discuss the origins of our approach, our lessons learned, and how a holistic view of practices from many different areas is required not only to develop solutions correctly, but to develop the correct solution.
In Chapter 9, we will focus on cloud service management and operations. We will discuss what management and management practices must look for in the cloud. This will include introducing new practices that we have developed and that we have seen work in some of the most challenging enterprise contexts.
In Chapter 10, we will introduce our views on governance. We cannot overstate the importance of governance, which provides the backdrop for effective execution of strategy and continuous advancement toward business outcomes.
The IBM Cloud Adoption Playbook will provide you not only with a conceptual framework for cloud adoption and digital transformation, but with a complete, structured, holistic, and pragmatic approach to succeeding on the cloud.
Notes
1
. Bohlen, Joe M.; Beal, George M. (May 1957).
“The Diffusion Process”
. Special Report No. 18. Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College.
1
: 56–77
.
2
. Image by Craig Chilius, used under Creative Commons 3.0 License.
3
. Columbus, Louis. “2017 State Of Cloud Adoption And Security.” Forbes. April 23, 2017. Accessed January 31, 2018.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/04/23/2017-state-of-cloud-adoption-and-security/#310410861848
.
1Business 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. Putting these two together, you see that you need to achieve the outcomes by using the services provided by cloud providers. This requires a model that allows you to choose not only what services you want, but where they run, and what vendors or providers you purchase them from. We provide practical examples of these models throughout the book.
Taking a step back and looking at the business intents behind why customer adopt cloud, we see enterprises taking advantage of the cloud model because it promises improved efficiency, expanded innovation potential, and revenue growth. We see technology and business function leaders alike attracted to the cloud for the value that it has the potential to deliver. Within these enterprises, leaders are aligning their cloud adoption and their digital transformation programs through strategic intents such as the following:
Creating a customer-focused enterprise:
This intent takes advantage of the cloud model to optimize data and use analytics to adapt to new user behaviors, cultivate trust, and drive profitable growth while preserving an exceptional user experience.
Increasing flexibility and streamlining operations:
You can use the cloud to improve operating leverage with variable cost structures that increase flexibility for both the user and the provider of the cloud-based service. Furthermore, you need to provide higher-quality service, accelerate time to market, and reduce risk.
Driving innovation while managing cost:
By using the cloud to deliver new services efficiently, these new services can improve cost flexibility, provide users instant gratification, and drive competitive differentiation. But you must balance these improvements against decreasing cost per transaction and optimization of existing investments.
Optimizing enterprise risk management:
You can use the cloud to achieve compliance objectives and mitigate operational risk while maximizing return on equity; combating malicious activity; and incorporating repeatability, scalability, resiliency, and flexibility.
At the time of the 2011 NIST definition, cost reduction, improved data access, and demand generation were the top business drivers for cloud adoption. We have seen business drivers, technology platforms, services offered, and cloud deployment models evolve since that time. The top business drivers for cloud now include building exceptional user experiences, providing services in a multi-cloud hybrid environment, and modernizing applications to update existing Information Technology estates. Modernization is especially important for protecting your existing investment while opening applications and data up for new value delivery.
Enterprise digital transformation began with cost savings and simple lift-and-shift initiatives purely for efficiency. Efficiency is now a given, and enterprises require a multi-cloud, integrated platform to enable them to disrupt their industries and lead in their markets.
Although the cloud has helped early adopters generate innovation and new forms of collaboration, there is a concerted shift to scale cloud adoption across the enterprise. This shift includes addressing digital transformation in a sustained way, recognizing that some business functions are more amenable to cloud adoption than others.
Leveraging business drivers and strategic intent to guide and inform the way you rethink cloud adoption and digital transformation means maintaining alignment throughout the transformation journey. Your business is reinvented as the transformation occurs and accomplishments are achieved. The cloud becomes a true catalyst, generating momentum and creating a virtuous circle that creates sustained business success with expanded effect throughout the enterprise.
With your understanding of the intrinsic relationship between business and technology and the need to continuously strive for alignment through the techniques described in the Playbook, we believe that you will be much better positioned to achieve success in both the short term and the long term.
Implications to the Enterprise
Many of the ideas we describe in this book can and should apply to any organization, but we highlight the challenges that cloud adoption presents in large enterprises, particularly those that are involved in strategic outsourcing.
You need to understand the critical importance of the value that technology vendors and service providers deliver to enterprises — and, equally important, the rate of adoption and transformation within your enterprise. Although the Playbook assumes the perspective of the enterprise, for a fuller context, you must consider the service-provider relationships and contract vehicles through which such value is delivered to you.
Especially in strategic outsourcing arrangements, service providers earn their revenue by taking on risk on behalf of their clients. If you are in an arrangement like this, it means that you must take care to ensure that you factor in the commitments the service provider has made (including appropriate procedures, buffers, service level agreements, and checks) into how you realize the Playbook in real life. As a result, we recommend a holistic approach to transformation, taking into account time, relationships, organizations, assumptions, talent, culture, and other factors. Likewise, you need to take a pragmatic approach as you apply the tips in this book, one that recognizes where your organization is in their journey, that meets your organization where they are, and that guides the organization along the path of cloud adoption and digital transformation.
As you balance sustained innovation and disruptive innovation to keep pace with market forces and business priorities, the culture of care and risk-aversion typically comes into direct conflict with the need for rapid innovation. Our experience is that clearly outlined criteria along the dimensions of consideration enable decision-making for these types of trade-offs. Where you fall on the spectrum between sustained innovation and disruptive innovation and the decisions that you need to make depend on factors specific to your organization and your priorities. We address these important dimensions in Chapter 2 on the Framework and in later chapters.
We observe, especially in long-term strategic outsourcing arrangements, that enterprises see capabilities in the cloud that seem similar to — and cheaper than — what they’re paying a lot of money for in their existing contracts. Enterprises also see many new possibilities in the cloud. These possibilities can be realized through cognitive capabilities; containers; prefabricated mobile application development environments; DevOps components; and a spectrum of useful services such as data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These kinds of services are offered in a variety of cloud environments, and organizations are applying multi-cloud adoption strategies to take advantage of these services where they exist. Therefore, market pressure is growing to employ these powerful capabilities to deliver new value faster — and at scale.
These are just a few practical examples of how innovation changes the relationship between the service provider and the service consumer in the enterprise context. Our experience is that the implications of digital transformation can be quite wide reaching. In addition to innovating with technology, you need to innovate in your vendor contracts to capture the evolving relationship between the enterprise and the service provider. Further, you must incorporate these technologies into the new enterprise operating model in order to take full and meaningful advantage of these new possibilities. It will do you no good if your contract with your service provider makes you pay for services that are no longer needed because they have been replaced by newer cloud-based technologies, or that forces you to continue to provision services such as development environments manually when they can be instead directly requested through a self-service catalog.
You also must consider your enterprise’s tolerance for sustained or disruptive innovation and how that innovation fits into its priorities. The process begins by clarifying your objectives. You must decide what you really want from digital transformation and cloud adoption. You must determine the strategic intent behind those objectives, determine how well aligned your enterprise is to those objectives, and continually re-evaluate what you must do to align with these objectives.
We see many tried-and-true business models being disrupted by cloud service providers and the services that they provide. This causes enterprises to react in a variety of ways; in many cases, the response has been to adopt multimodal IT; that is trying to segregate projects into “faster” and “slower” lanes to allow innovation on the cloud even as they seek alternative solutions.
What’s more, lines of business that are pressed by market forces find themselves having to work around their internal IT providers. This is because the LOB’s believe they need either responsiveness or capabilities beyond what internal IT has the capacity to offer. As a result, instead of internal IT acting as a trusted adviser and de facto service provider, others assume this role.
Summary
This chapter showed what drives businesses to the cloud, and what businesses can expect to gain from cloud adoption. This chapter also showed how the cloud can disrupt your current approaches and IT operations models — both internally and with outside vendors.
Digital transformation is not easy; it requires inspiration, a clear and consistent focus, and persistence over time. It also requires a playbook to help you understand all the different areas you need to consider and how they work together or come into conflict.
This leaves you, as a catalyst and a leader, in a challenging position. You need to be able to address the following questions:
How do you articulate a holistic but pragmatic approach that takes organizational tensions into account and recognizes the need to move quickly and in a concerted, coordinated way?
How do you decide where to start bringing key stakeholders to the table and charting a path that causes alignment?
What are the steps you need to follow to significantly increase the chances of success while reducing risk to the enterprise?
We will explore the answers to these questions (and others) in Chapter 2.
Notes
1
. Khan, Shahyan, Leadership in the Digital Age — a study on the effects of digitalization on top management leadership (Stockholm Business School, Thesis, 2016),
https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:971518/FULLTEXT02.pdf
.
2
. Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the future of your organization and your life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
3
. Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (New York: HarperBusiness, 2011).
4
. D. Michael Lindsay and M. G. Hager, View From the Top: An Inside Look at How People in Power See and Shape the World (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014).
2Framework Overview
In this chapter, we introduce our approach for moving organizations into cloud-enabled digital transformation through an actionable framework that makes up the rest of the Playbook. We assembled this framework by mining insights from our extensive experience partnering with our largest enterprise clients. The framework is meant for leaders, catalysts, and key influencers who are looking to accelerate and replicate sustained transformative success in their organizations.
Throughout the Playbook we will reference examples of real clients from a variety of industries that have successfully navigated this kind of transformative journey. We will provide ongoing examples from three companies where we successfully applied the framework:
We showed a global multinational bank headquartered in Europe how to reduce overall IT spend 21 percent over two years through a workload modernization and migration effort.
We partnered with a global airline to deliver new applications in months rather than years, while at the same time moving their critical existing workloads onto the cloud, and fundamentally changing the way they performed service management on the cloud.
We worked with a global building-materials manufacturing company to change its supply chain and order-to-cash processes to take advantage of an integrated digital platform, providing a seamless multi-device experience for placing orders, tracking shipments, and managing invoices and payments.
These examples demonstrate how the framework has been applied in practice — an approach that has guided decision-making and digital transformation road-map execution in a repeatable way and at scale.
Throughout the book, and specifically in the framework description, we will assume an outside-in perspective. The outside-in approach ensures that we are being client-centered as we apply the decisions in the framework. The most important thing to us is to make sure that we enable our client’s success, which is more critical than following the rules or procedures of a framework. That perspective determined the structure of the framework by leading us to establish three simple themes that guide the decision-making process (see Figure 2-1):
Think and Envision the Transformation
to establish the strategic intent of the transformation.
This step is the most important one. As we stated earlier, the cloud is a means to an end. First, you must determine what goals the business wants to achieve before you begin any other planning.
Balance the Transformation
to decide what works best for the enterprise.
Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, an enterprise doesn’t fully move onto the cloud in a day, or even in a year. There is always a balance that must be struck in understanding what aspects of the digital transformation you can move toward quickly and what parts will take more time.
Thrive on New Foundations
to realize the strategic outcomes at scale and over a sustained period (typically, three to five years).
We want to help build organizations that are successful over the long run, which means going well beyond moving a single project to the cloud or transforming a single development team. To be successful over that time frame, you must establish organizational structures, policies, and procedures that are resilient and effective in the face of a rapidly changing technology landscape.
Figure 2-1: Framework themes.
Client strategic objectives anchor the framework and serve as guideposts to meet your organization where it is, and to chart a path to your future strategic outcomes.
The Framework
As we set the context and explore the framework elements in detail, we recognize that transformation is hard and needs to be given thoughtful consideration. Transformation involves much more than technology alone; people, process, information, and culture are other important factors. Therefore, cloud adoption and digital transformation come with challenges and exacerbate friction in existing constructs, which need to be addressed for successful outcomes. Following are some of these possible areas of friction (but by no means an exhaustive list):
Organizations moving to the cloud must make migration and modernization decisions to determine the best fit for existing applications and data.
The problem here is that whenever an application is selected to move to the cloud or stay on existing platforms, some people who are touched by that decision will disagree not on technical merits, but on how the decision affects them or their career goals.
