Innovation = invention + adoption

Innovation is not an elusive magical unicorn or a big-bang transformational event. Instead, successful Innovation is a balancing act, illustrated by a simple equation:?

Innovation = invention + adoption.

Innovation is not just about new ideas: "as long as we have ideas, everything else will magically get solved" is a misconception.

The journey to continuous reinvention often includes failure; however, finding what doesn't work will help us identify what works more clearly.

Most business dictionaries define Innovation as "The process of translating an invention or idea into a good or service that creates value."?

The cloud is often an excellent platform for invention of the technological aspects of Innovation. Unfortunately, most great ideas fail during the hard work of adoption rather than during the ideation or invention processes. To ensure success, development teams should always start with adoption as the test for Innovation. The team should agree upon the following three commitments:

• Commitment to prioritize customers over technology
• Commitment to transparency
• Commitment to iteration

Enterprises are often looking forward to simply migrating to the cloud or transforming their businesses using application modernization and Innovation led approaches. However, most start with assessing their software and applying business requirements to minimize disruption, reduce costs, and optimize speed.

Migrating a legacy system involves taking an old infrastructure and transferring it to the cloud; this provides potential cost and efficiency benefits. However, it fails to give the applications a growth perspective. This option is missing the?big picture vision?that can take your business to a different level.

However, cloud migration can work wonders for small-scale firms as the resources are limited. The important part is to involve your business units in assessing the impact of changes.

Migration coupled with Modernization and Innovation as the goal, on the other hand, can enhance overall operations and give your technology and business a fresh perspective. It can improve communication & collaboration across departments and give rise to better-organized processes and workflows. The actionable insights that a company gains via real-time reporting helps them respond to issues faster and meet customer demands efficiently.

The real benefits of boosting efficiency, reducing the TCO, and gaining actionable insights from your data come with migrating and further modernizing your applications to foster Innovation.

An essential starting point to making the Migration vs. Innovation vs. Modernization decision is to understand the pain points of your business. Also, take the age and maintainability of your legacy system into account when putting together an Innovation / Modernization strategy. Then, you choose the best cloud resources that best suit your demands & come up with the corresponding architecture to execute your cloud adoption plan.

The strategy and tools used to migrate an application to the cloud depend on your business motivations, technology strategies, timelines, and a deep understanding of the current state (Infrastructure, apps, and data) being migrated.

The choice to migrate using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) technologies is driven by the balance between time, cost, existing technical debt, and long-term returns. For example, IaaS is often the fastest path to the cloud with the slightest necessary change to the workload. On the other hand, PaaS could require modifications to data structures or source code but produces substantial long-term returns in reduced operating costs and greater technical flexibility.

An affirmative answer to the following questions indicates that Innovation is a better approach than a candidate for the lift and shift modernization model. Instead, the data structures or business logic would be re-created as a new or rearchitected application.

• Do the applications create market differentiation?
• Is there a proposed or approved investment to improve the experiences associated with the applications?
• Does the data in this application make new service or product offerings available?
• Is there a proposed or approved investment to take advantage of the data associated with this application?
• Can the effect of the new offerings or market differentiation be quantified and justifiable?

Define the strategy and identify the business outcomes

Engage different stakeholders and document the desired business outcomes:

• Fiscal outcomes: include increased revenue, savings in cost, and drive profits
• Agility outcomes: include time-to-market and provision time to respond to changes
• Reach outcomes: include global access and data sovereignty
• Customer engagement: outcomes include meeting customer expectations by reducing cycle times
• Performance outcomes: include having highly available, global applications
• Security & Compliance regulations addressed and implemented

Ultimately, the transformative value businesses seek from the cloud goes beyond migration to?modernize?and innovate specific business operations that enable new capabilities and potential new business revenue streams and outcomes.

The capabilities gained from a modern, outcome-based architecture, connect people across the organization, automate processes and accelerate Innovation.

Innovation is not a destination but a journey—embrace it.