Cloud Chronicles: Navigating the Journey Through Digital Transformation

Chronicle 1: Establishing your Cloud Vision

In today’s digital landscape, a clear and compelling cloud vision isn’t just a luxury – it’s the cornerstone of strategic success. There is no right or wrong answer to what the vision should be, only that it must be understood and articulated from a top-down perspective.

In this blog we are going to dive deeper into three key topics in establishing the cloud vision:

1.???? Why is the cloud vision required?

2.???? What should a cloud vision encompass?

3.???? Who should define the cloud vision?

So what is a cloud vision and why is it required?

A cloud vision is a strategic, aspirational narrative that defines your organisation's long-term goals and desired business outcomes it wants to achieve through its cloud journey. It should outline your strategic intent and will serves as a guiding principle for all cloud-related initiatives and decisions.

A well-crafted cloud vision serves as a North Star, guiding the organization's cloud strategy, investment decisions, and execution. It provides a clear and compelling narrative that resonates with stakeholders, from the C-suite to the front line execution teams, ensuring a unified and coordinated approach to cloud transformation.

However, this is not to say the cloud vision remains constant. It must evolve with your organisations journey and its ever-changing business outcomes. If the vision needs to pivot to ensure you continue producing customer value, then the vision pivots, but fundamentally the reasons why remain the same:

• Alignment: A well-defined vision helps align your organization around a common goal and direction for the cloud journey. This ensures everyone is working towards the same goals and everyone understands what success looks like, not just at a technical level but that business outcomes lens
• Strategic Planning: A vision provides the ‘NorthStar’ for developing a detailed cloud strategy and roadmap of change. It helps stakeholders and leaders determine both the ‘what’, the ‘when’ and ‘how’ the organisation is going to benefit from the value associated with a public cloud platform
• Transformation Management: A vision gives you a clear ‘NorthStar’ to work towards, making it easier to understand the reasons behind transformation decisions track progress of these decisions, and make course corrections as needed.
• Justification: A clearly defined and communicated vision can help justify the investments and business case required for a cloud journey. Primarily seen as a ‘technology programme’ articulating the vision and the business outcomes associated with achieving it, should gain buy-in from all areas of leadership. The vision should demonstrate the strategic value and long-term benefits of the cloud journey.
• Optimization and Continuous Improvement: A well-defined vision allows all levels of your organisation to measure the success of your cloud journey, products and initiatives and make data-driven decisions with customers in mind to optimize and refine your cloud environments. It provides a benchmark to measure the impact and return on your cloud investment.
• Agility and Adaptability: A vision is not constant nor rigid. A vision enables your organisation to adapt to changing business requirements, emerging technologies, and market dynamics. This helps ensure the long-term relevance and value of your cloud strategy.

So what should a cloud vision look like?

It can be anything and everything. However, through our experience of helping leaders define their visions, we have identified some key elements that should typically be included:

1.???? Business Outcomes: The vision should be anchored closely with your organisation's overarching business goals, such as improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, or enabling new revenue streams. These are just examples, but ensuring the vision is something that enables these is key to a successful journey

2.???? Transformation Scope: The vision should define the extent of the cloud transformation, whether it's a partial migration, a complete cloud-first approach, or the integration of cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

3.???? Target Cloud Capabilities: The vision should describe the specific cloud capabilities the organization aims to leverage, such as scalability, flexibility, analytics, or DevOps.

4.???? Competitive Advantage: The vision should articulate how the cloud will help the organization achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in its industry or market.

5.???? Organizational Impact: The vision should consider the cultural, operational, and workforce changes required to successfully adopt and maximize the cloud's benefits.

When embarking on developing the cloud vision these questions can be utilised as a starting point to help provoke thought around its definition:

• What is our business motivation for using cloud technology?
• How does cloud enable our long-term strategic goals and objectives?
• What guiding principles will shape our approach to cloud adoption and utilisation?
• What are anticipated costs of migrating to and operating in the cloud, and how do measure the success on our ROI?
• What does success look like for our organisation in terms of cloud adoption?
• How do we plan to differentiate ourselves in the market through our cloud strategy?
• How do we envision the cloud transforming our Business and IT operations and processes?
• What role will cloud play in our product and innovation strategy and how will it be fostered?
• How will the cloud empower our employees and enable them to be more agile and productive?
• What considerations do we need to make in regards to security, compliance and regulation?
• What are the potential risks associated with migrating to the cloud, and how do we mitigate them?

So who defines the cloud vision?

The cloud vision should be defined in a collaborative way, with a number of key stakeholders. Different roles will have their own opinions and vested interests in what a public cloud platform should and will enable for them. By hearing and recognising the visions of a number of people, it ensures your organisation is not being steered by a singular bias towards one person’s vision. What must be considered by each stakeholder is how does their vision tie back to the organisations business outcomes. This needs to be continually your anchoring point of a vision.

Executive Leadership:

• The C-suite, including the CEO, CIO, and COO, play a crucial role in establishing the strategic direction and high-level goals for the cloud transformation.
• They provide the overarching business context, priorities, and vision that will shape the organization's cloud journey.

IT Leadership:

The CIO, IT managers, and cloud architects are responsible for translating the business vision into a technical cloud strategy and roadmap

• They assess the organisation's current IT capabilities, identify the cloud capabilities required to support the business goals, and define the target cloud architecture.

Business Unit Leaders:

• Leaders of various revenue generating business units, as well as supporting business units (e.g. finance, marketing, HR) provide valuable insights into the specific cloud-enabled capabilities and use cases that can drive innovation and value creation within their domains.
• Their input ensures that this journey does not become an IT journey, but remains an organisational journey and the impacts are understood.

External Advisors: (If required)

• Consulting firms, industry analysts, and cloud service providers can offer an outside perspective and expertise to help shape the cloud vision.
• They can provide insights into industry trends, best practices, and emerging cloud technologies that the organization should consider.

Final Thoughts

Having worked with 30+ global enterprises in different stages of their cloud journey, no matter what resources are available or how many countries your organisation spans, maintaining alignment is the most difficult element. Not having a clear, transparent and well communicated cloud vision will lead to variations on how your cloud journey is executed, how statements are translated and what is defined as success.

The creation of a vision is a process that requires collaboration, patience and research. The vision is critical to the long-term success of an organisation leveraging cloud to achieve their business outcomes and seeing it as a ‘nice to have’ will lead to a lot of pain further into your journey. Remember 70% of transformations fail due to non-technical reasons and the vision is the first part to mitigating this.