3 Silo-Breaking Tips For Cloud Transformations

Trying to do a cloud transformation with the old technology silos of network, compute, storage, security, operations and developers is like trying to win a formula 1 race on 3 wheels, you might start off the line ok but you'll crash at the first turn!

The business is now expecting your IT teams to understand not just the business needs but its customers expectations as well, this is aligned to the push for IT to focus on human centered design.  It's no longer acceptable to only request a regimented list of business requirements with very little understanding of the thinking or reasoning behind them.

IT teams must start with the people you're designing for and end with the solution that is tailor made to suit their needs.

To drive this change through your organisation its going to take more than a team meeting and some emails.  A cloud transformation is first and foremost an organisational and culture change which can be especially challenging in a large enterprise.  But with the right approach you can start to have a positive impact on the organisations readiness for the cloud transformation by following these 3 main steps:

1.  Communication with everyone in your organisation about the need for the cloud tranformation, its benefits and how they can individually help is a key factor for success.  Without everyone knowing why you're going through all this change there will be too much inertia from the employees.

The other key communication is between your IT teams and the people who deal directly with customers since its rare that your IT teams will even know anyone in the company who directly deals with your customers.  You want to turn your entire IT team into evangelists for your services.  

One way to get your teams exposure to the broader organisation and their challenges, as well as start singing the virtues of your services is as simple and as cheap as 2 weekly coffees for each of your team for at least 6 weeks.  Go buy a bunch of coffee vouchers from a local coffee shop and give them to your team with instructions to find 1 person within another department to take out for coffee.  The amount of information and understanding your team will gain of the challenges your organisation is facing will be huge.  

Ensure you bring these insights back into the broader team and share them to allow everyone to understand the issue in a wider sense and start to collaborate on possible solutions. 

There are even apps like nevereatalone.io that help facilitate an easy way to find others within your organisation that a looking to learn more about your area of business.

2.  Once you've started your organisation on this path you should find the re-organisation to mixed skill and/or DevOps teams that are aligned to business services and their outcomes a little easier.  Because of the regular catch ups with the people directly dealing with customers your teams might already be self-organising into mixed skilled teams that are aligned to business services and are trying to fix the business issues they now have visibility of and fully understand. 

Start to structure your teams into mixed skill or DevOps teams, which ever make sense for your organisation, that are aligned to your business services.  Don't just pick an alignment to business units, as many systems will be cross line of business.  Instead look at a logical alignment that focuses on an eco-system of applications like billing, crm, hr & finance, etc.

By focusing the teams on an eco-system of applications instead of line of business they have the ability to do the best thing for the entire organisation instead of being pushed into only doing the best thing by one unit, which in most cases is detrimental to the organisation as a whole.

3.  Finally write and communicate your new IT teams value proposition in easy to understand language.  Its great to have a published and defined service catalog but this is too rigid and doesn't allow for the innovative solutions your teams can build to meet the business and their customers needs.  The service catalog is still needed but don't make it the only services you provide, allow the business to have an open discussion about their needs without the first question being "why can't you use the service catalog?" or "do you have a time billing code for this meeting?".  The value proposition will also help give your team a clear improvement purpose instead of the traditional "keeping the lights on" attitude.

Here is an example:

Billing Team Value Proposition

The billing team aims to utilise the advanced technologies of our billing services to provide the capability you need with a range of price points, reporting capabilities and levels of resilience.  We can facilitate the duplication, replication or migration of entire billing datasets to enable a safe and rapid change of your billing services.  Talk to us today about how we can help you get the most out of your billing system and its datasets.

A simple statement like this is a discussion starter for the business instead of a discussion stopper like the service catalog.

With this approach to breaking down the silos you'll be well on you way to a successful cloud transformation that is supported and not hindered by your teams. 

This follows on from my 8 Reasons Why Enterprises Fail at Cloud Transformations article. Over the next few weeks I'll continue to post an in-depth perspective on each of the 8 reasons to help you with your cloud transformation, so make sure you follow me for updates.