A cloud strategy is a concise point of view on the role of cloud within the organization. It is a living document, designed to bridge between a high-level corporate strategy and a cloud implementation/adoption/migration plan. A cloud strategy is different from a cloud adoption or migration plan.
Your strategy will differ depending on the stage of your business and your reasons for moving to the cloud. If you’re a new business, for example, your goal might be to move fast and grow your customer base as quickly as possible. A more established business might have different expectations.
Defining the vision of where you see cloud services helping your organization is phase 1, step one. In this phase, we will begin to define the strategic vision and business outcomes, that will drive innovation and correlate that with your business drivers.
The first step will be to define challenges as it relates to technology, manual or inefficient processes, communication or access to data or systems. This is important to define to understand the challenges whether they are real or perceived that can be barriers to the success of the overall project.
Once the challenges are defined, we’ll examine opportunities to modernize now it is time to dive into opportunities. The goal is to identify opportunities or ideas that will solve these challenges. can be implemented to solves these crucial challenges. We will explore how technology can help with the opportunities or where there is lag behind others to make things more efficient, provide better access or offer services to our community, partner, staff or businesses.
Finally, after challenges and opportunities have been prioritized, a summary of the desired capabilities will be compiled.
In this phase of the strategy planning, we validate systems in place and evaluate what changes are needed to achieve the future-state. This information will drive what infrastructure and processes we need to support the business from a cloud perspective.
From defining the capabilities in Step 1, this is where we will explore if the current systems support the capabilities or not. This can be broken into 3 categories:
1. The system does not exist within the organization today
2. The current system will not provide the needed data/integration/services to support this capability within the organization
3. The current system is in place today but needs some minor configuration changes to enable the features.
Further exploration will be needed to discuss trends, best practices, as well as if this project should be done in house or hosted to a cloud provider.
In order to prepare for change and bringing new capabilities to your organization, we will need to understand the impacts to people, process and technology. Identifying the impacts to IT resources, department resources, process changes, and technology that may be needed to support the capability is explored here. This is where we will identify what the next steps are as well as form a plan to make it happen.
This is the final step of phase 1, step 2, sending your findings. IT will be able to start working on organizing the detailed discussions to explore them further.
Motivation and justification for change is the next step in phase 1. It is important to deliver a high degree of value to the business. . Benefits can come in many forms: increased productivity, improved public/business perception, reduced costs, streamlined processes or even reduced cycle time. This is known as a cost-benefit analysis and is as important as the strategy that was defined. This is the motivation for change and investment.
Defining the benefits to implementing the capabilities is critical. This is where tangible data such as number of transactions, cost per transaction, increased throughput, reduced cycle time data etc. will be necessary. Quantifying the impact, cost or benefit to some of the items that can be measured will provide more detail to the stakeholders.
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