The ability for an organization to transform its culture is ultimately driven by its people. Processes must continually be adapted to meet new requirements, and the use of technology must continue evolve to meet the needs of the business, but the people in an organization is the constant in any transformation.
Individual stakeholders must be empowered to drive and lead transformation across an organization. Below are some example questions to review internally with relevant stakeholders. These questions are used to help gauge the readiness of the organization for executing against its tranformation initative:
Is there complete alignment across the organization on which infrastructure service provider(s) the business will align?
If not, how will this risk be mitigated to reduce the likelihood of delays to progress, rogue cloud deployments and associated costs?
Do existing agreements exist with the providers of choice, or do they need to be negotiated?
Does the individual expertise exist internally to properly negotiate said agreements?
Are finance and procurement teams aligned on how to move from a Capital Expenditure (CapEx) model, to one driven predominately by Operational Expenditures (OpEx) for infrastructure resource consumption?
Do budget allocations and structure easily allow for this shift?
Do key individuals possess the technical skills across operations teams to support the businesses critical workloads and applications that are moving to, or will be developed in the cloud?
If so, how quickly can IT change their runbooks, their tooling, and extend their automation to factor in remote and unique infrastructure components?
If not, how do these individuals acquire the necessary skills – Retrain individuals? Hire desired skills into existing teams? Outsource?
What is the internal perception of public cloud, and is it the same across all facets of the business?
Are there cloud adverse stakeholders as acting members of the decision tree?
Does all existing systems and tooling have sufficient licensing to be deployed and run on remote, cloud provider owned infrastructure?
If not, what is involved in ensuring the proper cloud licensing is acquired?
The answers to these questions and many others will provide an organization an idea of the potential tradeoffs and/or risks. Organizations that engage in an open and early dialogue will gain a better understanding of the required changes to successfully execute their transformation.
