TCO savings are great, but it is time to
redefine the true success metrics of your
cloud transformation.
Who is disrupting your market...your competitors or you? When small teams of
aggressive entrepreneurs can compete with legacy, industry dominating com-
panies, the whole paradigm of stability is turned upside down. When well
established companies lose market share to new startups, gone are the classic
metrics for technology success. Counterintuitively, when these companies find
themselves in a fight for surviva l, a thorough justification for a game-changing
technology is often cast aside.
Following our Q4 2017, “Secrets of the Cloud Leaders” report with CloudHealth
Technologies, we recognized that too many leaders were measuring success
solely on simple TCO calculations. Why? Upon further review, we discover
these leaders find it easier to defend TCO calculations. While this is true, it is
also lazy and quite dangerous.
Leaders who are leveraging the speed, safety and agility of cloud must go
beyond the procurement death-spiral of cost justification. Without a funda-
mental shift in focus to the key drivers of change, your business will be con-
sumed by the highly confident, less encumbered professionals who know how
to sell solutions to those who have the necessary funding. For without the nec-
essary funding, your cloud program goes nowhere!
Success Redefined
We must redefine what success looks like to your company. If success is mea-
sured only in straight-line economics such as TCO, the Cloud Leader is missing
the powerful, strategic objectives that elevate the conversation to a matter of
life and death. This is no exaggeration. Consider, for example, how SmileDi-
rectClub is disrupting the orthodontics industry with cloud-based tools and
services that eliminate the need to visit a dentist — for 60% less cost than tra-
ditional methods. Stories like this now happen every day and there is not
enough room in this article to list them all.
Therefore, a new measure of success must be adopted. To do this, we must
employ a framework of maturity, whereby a team can self-assess their current
capabilities and plot a course to the more critical objectives — the higher levels
of maturity. The goal is that with each new level of cloud maturity, the organi-
zation will operate at a higher velocity, add more value to the business and do
it all with less.
SPRING 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 83