Building Cloud Center of Excellence

With a USD$1 trillion cloud computing market on the way, what’s in ?your cloud plan?

Depending on which market analyst you follow, the estimated 2026 size of the cloud computing market is about one trillion dollars. Business and IT professionals already know that cloud drives speed of innovation, agility without a lot of fixed costs, and flexible resource allocation. Given that one could use cloud to optimize an end-to-end IT environment and change it at will – a strategy that wouldn’t work with legacy infrastructure – digitization, cloud migration and application modernization are hot topics. Also, there is no concept of one cloud, but in reality enterprises often have on an average up to 5 cloud vendors that add further complexity and create the need for “skycomputing.”

Even with general agreement about the high value of cloud, adoption rates at organizations globally are between 15-20%. How are you – and your enterprise – leading the effort to cloud?

As the cloud competency leader at Kyndryl’s Cloud Center of Excellence, my role is to share best practices enterprises need for a successful journey to cloud. In this blog I provide insight into how we create a systematic plan that is a working tool for the journey to cloud – a customized success blueprint that goes beyond a simple roadmap.

From crawl to walk to run in the cloud transition

With a tested and validated process, it’s not hard to go from crawl to walk to run in the cloud transition. But no matter where you start, there are several keys to follow.

For simplicity, I’ve put the keys into five buckets: 1) business vision 2) prioritize your business goals, 3) plan for the plans, 4) work the transformation levers, and 5) prioritize, standardize, and scale.

1.?Business Vision

We are amidst the most challenging “Technological Olympics” of our lifetime where in markets are highly volatile and digital disrupters continue to challenge the incumbents at accelerated speed. Macro factors driven by covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical unrest and climate change are further urging organizations to innovate faster to stay relevant and adapt to changing business environment. ?We know that staying afloat and gaining market share requires new insights, more targeted and differentiated offerings, automating workflows, highest level of employees and consumer engagements and more.

Frame your vision for cloud migration journey to empower application modernization, infusing data science and AI workflows to build the capabilities to which the enterprise aspires.?Set specific metrics and governance to be able to measure the progress of cloud transformation vision, e.g., revenue growth, improved employee productivity, optimize enterprise financial risk to market fluctuations or secure your organization against cybercrimes.

?2.?Prioritize the business goals

Continuous innovation is the success mantra for businesses today. What are the main business priorities that the cloud transformation will accomplish for the enterprise? Pick your most compelling one or two prime targets.

Examples of priorities are to improve customer experiences, respond faster to market changes, reduce costs, improve employee productivity, re-deploy IT infrastructure investments, or create a coherent business platform framework.

Related to this is the question of how will you and your team build the credentials and credibility to lead the cloud effort? What technical resources, labs, or hackathons could you run to execute the transformation? This is how you will define and create a cloud-native operating model, because ideas need to be tested and validated before full production and go-live deployment at speed and scale.

3.?Plan for the plan

?“Plans are nothing but planning is everything”

Successful transformation programs are a team support. Cloud journeys will yield positive outcomes only if there are synergies across your leaders, teams, your functions throughout your organization. So, consider the entire ecosystem and stakeholders as you plan your cloud journey. By that I mean the relevant people, functions, vendors and technologies that will form the team in your journey to cloud. You have an existing IT ecosystem with infrastructure, applications, interdependencies, data, and connectivity. You also have multiple individuals, vendors, and functions. All must be assigned a role and come together as part of the transformation team. Your Cloud Center of Excellence should act as the center of gravity for the entire program providing a platform to all the stakeholders across the enterprise. Clear communication of the plan, ownership RACI models, and ongoing governance will be key components of the master plan to embed cloud technologies in the DNA of your organization. (RACI models contain the detail of who is responsible for doing the work, who is accountable or signs off on the work, who is consulted and in the feedback loop, and who needs to be informed).

4.?Work the cloud transformation levers

The transformation levers include talent, skills, demand management, expert advice, operating model, co-innovation labs, and marketing. Briefly, each lever is an important focus area for you to build your best-practices cloud capabilities. You’ll need a plan for each, but they don’t all need to happen at the same time. Think of them as swim lanes, and prioritize a few to get started.?

1. Talent - As you become a cloud thought leader, you’ll want to be able to define the resource needs. Prepare to hire externally, re-skill individuals internally and partner with specialized service providers to fuel the new cloud advisory, mainframe migration, application modernization or manage Day 2 operations.
2. Skills - Think of investing in gamification to inspire community based learning to create a team of cloud ninjas who will be the change leaders. Each one of them has a specialized skill set (e.g., devsecops, security, networking, observability) and serve as individual lighthouses to drive cloud transformation projects across enterprise.
3. Demand management - Once you show some success there will be new requests and demands for help through the organization. Establish a mechanism to help your teams reach you and advocate a demand prioritization framework to unlock value systematically.
4. Expertise and advice – Map available talent and skillsets to the requests for cloud services. Especially for larger organizations, who will you assign to support the specific geo needs and workstreams globally.
5. Operating model - To drive lasting enterprise-wide integration of the cloud capabilities, establish internal and external alliances and partnerships for ongoing support of cultural shift, management system to track governance and change management.
6. Co-Innovation labs – These labs are meant to create experiential selling and bring together think tanks across the organization to innovate and co-create, showcase?new ideas and enable next generation of talent across the organization. Your executive sponsors, cloud champions, and internal clients, will need a hands-on environment to engage – through virtual or live or hybrid models to develop demos/PoCs/MVPs/PoTs to test new ideas in a simulated environment.
7. Marketing – Marketing in this context is not just external communications. This means communicating content that you can share, distribute and use to get feedback from the extended stakeholder team. Think about creating internal content and feedback loops to communicate and crowdsource updates and ideas to stakeholders. Both vertically and horizontally – and across functions – stakeholders need to understand the goals, priorities, plan, and progress.

5.??Prioritize, standardize, and scale cloud transformation

In the first three months, prioritize the needs, communication them, and plan to make progress on a few important levers of the transformation effort. The next six-nine months will be about testing, validating, and standardizing the technology, processes and operations. Scale up over the next year or two as models are implemented and refined across all the product teams, business groups. This is when all seven transition levers are executed. ???

If you’re reading this blog then I don’t need to sell you on the benefits of cloud. But if I’ve given you insight into how to get started – or what to think about as you make progress on your journey to cloud - then I’ve done my job. Let me hear your thoughts on any of the above.

About Kyndryl

We like to say at Kyndryl that we’re a 90,000 person start-up. Kyndryl is an IBM spin-off company that designs and manages mission-critical technology systems. To catch up with the latest news from our cloud practice, visit us at kyndryl.com/us/en/services/cloud?