cloud.” These same companies also understand that
they must transform the way they build software and
start looking to DevOps as a way to become more
agile in the cloud. In this stage, cloud adoption is
intentional and rapid. Executives start applying very
strategic plans to transform their company to become
modern suppliers of IT services and bring in cloud
computing experts to help accelerate the change.
Stage 4: “All in” on the Cloud
At the unconscious competence stage, building solu-
tions in the cloud becomes natural. These companies
transformed the way software is built and delivered
and have created great value for their business. In
some cases they may have even enabled new business
models and are now looking for ways to accelerate
bringing value to the business. At this point, these
organizations are “all in” on the cloud. They also start
embracing PaaS, whether that is from a pure play
PaaS provider or higher level services from the IaaS
providers or both. These organizations understand
that there is little to no business value in infrastruc-
ture and the application stacks. The value received
from cloud computing is derived from delivering on
business requirements that drive more revenue, cre-
ating higher levels of services for customers, and get-
ting to market before their competitors.
“The lack of knowledge of the under-
lying technology, organizational
impact, and potential business value
causes organizations to deny the
usefulness of cloud computing.”
Companies in stage 4 are disrupting industries. For
an example of a disruptor, read about Capital One’s
keynote presentation at the AWS re:Invent confer-
ence (pg 30). Here we have a large, global financial
institution going all in with the public cloud and fun-
damentally changing the way they run IT.
General Electric is another example. GE is reducing
their data center footprint from 43 to 3 over the next
16 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2016
few years. They plan on moving over 60% of all global
workloads to the public cloud. As CIO, Jim Fowler put
it, “This is no longer an experiment. It’s no longer a
test. It’s not something we talk about as being proba-
ble. It is inevitable.” Companies like GE, Capital One
and many others, have reached the stage of uncon-
scious competence. They know cloud inside and out
and understand that they can radically change the
future of their company by going “all in” the cloud.
Summary
It takes time for large organizations to adopt and
embrace the cloud. The patterns that I have wit-
nessed over the years are very similar to the famous
“Four Stages of Competence” learning models cre-
ated by psychologists back in the 70s. If you are trying
to lead a cloud adoption program within your com-
pany it is important to understand these phases. Your
job is not to fight the learning model, but to acceler-
ate through the stages as fast as possible so that your
company can reap the benefits of becoming uncon-
sciously competent in the cloud before your compet-
itors read this article and do the same.