Digital transformation and cloud computing migrations typically involve transitioning from a non-standardized, minimally documented environment into a highly standardized, rigidly documented one. This is a highly challenging transition that requires effective organizational governance. It may also present significant change management challenges. To be successful, any corporate cloud computing transition strategy needs to be paired with a focused training and education program. This assessment is designed to identify whether such a program is in place or, if not, identify the appropriate organizational POC.
Organizational governance defines organizational structures, decision rights, workflow, and authorization points to create a target workflow that optimally uses a business entity's resources in alignment with the goals and objectives of the firm. Effective governance can only succeed if the organization has defined the desired outcomes and the proper metrics. Organizational leadership and management must be able to articulate what the desired outcomes are, who is accountable and responsible for these outcomes, what the escalation criteria or triggers to move a decision to the next level are, and what metrics will be used to monitor that the system is delivering the desired outcomes. The entire governance process needs to be continuously evaluated to determine that it provided the necessary transparency and timeliness to the decision makers and adjusted accordingly.
During transitions, the organization must simultaneously abandon business as usual and embrace the following across multiple dimensions:
- Security framework: Infrastructure-centric to data-centric
- Application development: Tightly coupled to loosely coupled
- Data: Mostly structured to mostly unstructured
- Business processes: Mostly serial to mostly parallel
- Security controls: Enterprise responsibility to shared responsibility
- Economic model: Mostly CAPEX to mostly OPEX
- Infrastructure: Mostly physical to mostly virtual
- IT operations: Mostly manual to mostly automated
- Technology operational scope: Local/regional to international/global:
Before embarking on any cloud transition program, the enterprise should implement a focused organizational change management strategy. There needs to be broad awareness, understanding, acceptance, and commitment across the organization of what is expected and when is it to be delivered by implanting focused organizational change management processes and procedures. The organization should regularly ask, is the corporate culture changing at the necessary rate and are all communication channels are being leveraged so that the right stuff is being communicated?