Moving to the Cloud - Management Decision Point.

Businesses are changing how they service their customers, introduce new products and find new revenue streams to take their organization to the next level. Business models of past, present and future will need to re-calibrate on their ability to bring higher degree of change at a rapid pace than every before. Business heads along with disruptive CIOs are at a tipping point of a transition where they have an existential event and use new methods for integrating technology as part of core business model. The successful but old business strategies of staff augmentation, traditional outsourcing, or other techniques are too expensive to scale. Instead, they use the power of networks and then give up a little control to get a lot of Technology adaption value back. Many organizations and thought leaders call this Digital Transformation in response to slow linear change to fast exponential change principally using Cloud Technologies. More and more organizations in high growth economies like India have already adopted new measures to evaluate their success of digital transformation. These new, non-customary business KPIs include indicators such as efficacy of business processes, data as a capital, employee and customer advocacy, loyalty & retention.

Having worked with many progressive organizations in the past, I have learnt that Business & IT leadership need to look at 12 critical aspects when they consider Technology to play important role in evolving their business model.

1. Changes to the software model
2. Development and quality assurance
3. Recovery from outage and credit for downtime.
4. Cross-border restrictions.
5. Capacity planning and growth.
6. Security and privacy.
7. Disaster recovery
8. Query performance and service levels
9. Data interchange in the cloud
10. Staffing levels are not zero
11. Organizational change management & movement to cloud must focus beyond technology and address the business & people-related objective
12. Picking first targets for the journey with strong executive sponsor

 As stated by Entrepreneur: “From the first magazine published in 1741, to the first billboards in the late 1800s to the internet age today, the art of getting the public’s attention and turning it into sales has gone through a dramatic evolution over the past few hundred years.” Any progressive organization that must have a growth mindset and wanting to transform their business while leveraging Technology must assume one or all of the below mentioned strategies:

1. Volume of effective digital chatter on the broader online space. Every organization be it an engineering projects company or ecommerce/online services company has an image that its customers and employees carry online. There needs to be a long term strategy to use this channel not just as an impression online but also as an effective channel to service its customers & employees over a sustained period of time. After all 55.1% of the world population is online and is growing at a very rapid pace.

1. Businesses have done valuation of their hard assets and can give a quantified value to them at any point in time. The same should apply to the organizations ‘data’. The failure to enumerate the “organizations value of data” may not only rob a company of value, but may severely inhibit its ability to maximally benefit from the digital transformation. It may start right at identifying what data does their company care about. 
2. If an organization is not gaining digital share, it is risking its future market share. Organizations that are looking at sustaining and growing their organization using Cloud Technology levers as an integral part of their business would require a sustained program of continuous improvement and investment.