Focus on the Second “S”

Thanks to my friend Anil George for stimulating some thoughts in my mind to write this article.

Cloud and Software as a Service or Value as a Service or other variations are commonly used buzzwords. In broader sense they mean that customers no longer purchase the software the same way that they used to purchase on premise. So one shouldn’t ignore the second “S” in SaaS or other variations. Not all clouds are same, some work only in virtual world of power point and some in real world. But some application clouds functional differences are getting narrowed as the innovation surpassing cloud. What makes a cloud solution different from other is very much dependent on the way of deployment, how they are able to assist on the change journey, how quickly the adoption happens and finally the total ownership experience. 

Often the case companies embark on the digital transformation journey and moving from on-premise system to cloud applications, but they focus too much on the functional differences and overlook critical aspects mentioned above. This is a technology-enabled transformation, which works out for few companies with minor change management activities. But, yet change-management in a project is savior for the both customer as well as the vendor, simply because of the user adoption.

Today’s cloud-based systems promise simple and streamlined processes, more robust data analytics, and simplified user experience. Naturally, few questions would arise, what is the deployment model would be? Is change-management needed during cloud implementations? If yes, then how rigorous is this compared to the traditional implementations? And these are very valid questions, which make customer successful. When I say change management, I am not referring to a process to manage technical configurations. I am referring to a process to prepare and support people through changes triggered due to transformation aka cloud shift and to ensure the achievement of desired business objectives as well as higher user adoption. 

John Kotter published “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”, where it is mentioned that 70% of the change initiatives are unsuccessful. The only thing consistent over last two decades is the need to enforce change management more than ever before in the era of the digital transformation, organizations have to take the holistic approach to see the change through. It’s the first step your organization must take before moving to the cloud, ignoring the “people impact” can put your cloud project on the path to failure.

The day is not far that prospects/customers focus on the Service more than the feature & functions, Cloud vendors significant amount of investments would get into customer success apart from Research & Development and finally Organization’s KPI’s would be aligned to user adoption metrics.