At the end of last year, we sent out a
survey to over 5,000 IT leaders who are
subscribed to the weekly Doppler
email asking them what cloud topics
they were interested in learning about
in 2017. While the usual suspects (cloud
strategy, security, IoT) were unsur-
prising, the responses to one topic
gave us pause. Only 3% of respondents
opted to learn more about organiza-
tional change management.
People. People are scared and anxious,
but not about security. Done correctly,
security is often better in public cloud
than on-premises alternatives. The real
security threat is the lack of emotional
safety. People simply do not know what
will happen to them. There’s no getting
around it - everyone wants to know
“What’s in it for me?” And when the
crowbar of cloud finally presses its
metal against your team, even the best
are jolted awake at night thinking about
the implications to their career and
financial well-being. Cloud is an
unknown for millions of IT profession-
als and when confronted with the
unknown, many will freeze and do
nothing.
Then why are we not moving faster?
Security
There’s no doubt about it. Public cloud
is creating a tectonic shift in how com-
panies look at IT. The upheaval started
by AWS is far from over and advance-
ments from Microsoft and Google con-
tinue to validate this trend. The tech-
nology works and, if you engage the
right team, can be built in less than 30
days - fully governed, managed and
move-in ready.
The Doppler Effect
So why do you suppose we would fea-
ture an article that so few people find
interesting? Because you need to hear
it! This is one of the top three reasons
we see cloud transformations stall or
outright fail. In Navigating the Cloud’s
Most Challenging Blocker: Your People,
we explore how to overcome the orga-
nizational challenges that are systemic
to every large cloud initiative.
Emotional Safety is Built on Trust
Great leaders create work environ-
ments that foster innovation. Innova-
tion requires emotional safety, and at
the core of emotional safety is trust.
Trust that your team will do the right
thing - time and again.
Robert Christiansen
VP, Cloud Technology Partners
SPRING 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 1