launch the next phase.
The months-long gap between the completion of the
Cloud Transformation Maturity Assessment and the
launch of the cloud program sapped the project’s
momentum. When proponents tried to pick it up
again, they had a hard time gathering support, partly
because they did not tie their next steps to a specific
cloud-related initiative or a compelling event. Usu-
ally, a company pursues a cloud project to accomplish
a particular goal — such as to migrate a certain num-
ber of workloads by a certain date, or to close two
data centers within a year. When the project has
marching orders, the CBO team members can map
out tasks. If they need to migrate workloads, they can
set up a plan to modify the related processes.
That didn’t happen here. The energy customer cre-
ated a CBO to develop processes to advance the com-
pany skill sets, but did not give the team a road map
to follow. And when the project picked up again, there
was no direction for how to proceed.
Lessons Learned
The lesson the customer learned was to engage early
on a short- and long-term plan for cloud transforma-
tion. The long-term plan can be general in nature –
for example, to become a cloud-enabled organization
ready to compete in the modern marketplace. But the
short-term plan has to be focused on a deliverable –
to accomplish a specific project and map all cloud-re-
lated initiatives to that project.
The energy customer started its CBO too early. It
should have laid out the specific deliverables, such as
building out a nonproduction cloud platform for
application teams to use, ensuring a cloud business
case is in place and assessing a set of applications for
their cloud suitability. A quick win would have posi-
tioned the company for long-term success.
Financial Services Organization
A
Neglects to Dissolve its Silos
Overview
A financial services customer embarked on a trans-
formation project to increase its agility while keeping
costs down. The company faced internal pressure to
release features and functionality faster, so it turned
to the cloud.
The company came to CTP to get help building out
core foundational services and a cloud service cata-
log that would be used by application teams. Com-
pany leaders authorized extensive prep work to
ensure that the project proceeded correctly. CTP led
a variety of maturity assessments, cloud strategy
plans and DevOps consultations, and then helped to
build out the capabilities.
Challenges
Unfortunately, people and politics got in the way.
Despite all the planning on the IT side, the customer
did not involve the application teams in the project.
When the application teams were told about the new
cloud capabilities, they did not buy in. They claimed
the new IT procedures were too cumbersome, and
kept building and deploying apps the way they did
before.
We see this quite often. One side of the organization
thinks it is achieving cloud culture change and build-
ing required cloud capabilities, but changes are being
made in two key departments not in the habit of
talking to each other. Members of the infrastructure
team are developing services they think are needed
for the cloud, while the application teams are devel-
oping apps on the cloud but not talking to the infra-
structure side of the house.
Lessons Learned
No matter how pristine your plan is, make sure you
get buy-in from the key players who need to work
together to achieve success. The work cannot be
done in a silo. You will risk creating cloud capabilities
no one will use.
The infrastructure team should align their develop-
ment of cloud capabilities with the needs of the busi-
ness application teams. Infrastructure leaders should
not be building out cloud capabilities without ensur-
ing there is a need for them within the organization.
“Build it and they will come” is not a sound cloud
strategy.
FALL 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 87