Think about the benefits of a new home – you think it’s a major step forward from where you are now. It’s a dream come true, but first you have to get organized and move from your current home. You check your stuff, pack important items and discard the rest. When you relocate to your new home, you will unpack and find something that was damaged during the move. You can’t find some items due to mislabeled boxes; others simply don’t fit in the new space. You realize you don’t have everything you need for your dream home, so you buy something new — with money you didn’t intend to spend.
Then you and the rest of your household may find it difficult to operate your new home environment due to your lack of experience and training with new appliances, entertainment, lighting and security systems. You begin to realize that despite your best efforts to plan and budget for the move, living in the new environment is not as efficient or cost-effective as you need.
It’s a lot like adopting the cloud: many companies plan their migrations in detail, but fail to reap the rewards of the cloud, either fully or partially. They missed a big opportunity. Rather than unlocking new value through the cloud — from enabling better customer experiences to optimizing costs — these organizations simply moved to the cloud without introducing new ways of working or anticipating new needs. This is the “cloud adoption paradox.”
What should I do? Time to slow down, take stock, pack up, and start your best life – in your new dream home or in the clouds.
We have learned from customers that navigating the cloud continuum is complex. Our research shows that while companies plan to migrate more than two-thirds of their workloads to the cloud, on average, only half of them are harnessing the full potential of cloud in all its forms to change over the next three to five years. Their day-to-day business operations. Typical issues include runaway cloud expenses, misalignment between business and IT, and inability to increase productivity due to limited delivery automation.
By focusing on cloud adoption – or simply migrating to the cloud – rather than what happens when your company lives in the cloud, the incremental value your organization ultimately derives from continuing to migrate very few. Competitive pressure intensifies. With so much capital invested, companies are still not taking advantage of new opportunities to deliver one-of-a-kind customer experiences or make business operations more efficient.
These developments come at a time when companies’ cloud spending is about to surpass non-cloud spending. The implications for companies across industries are enormous, and those caught up in the cloud adoption paradox will be left behind.
Let the cloud be your five leading practices Dream Home
So how can businesses adapt more successfully to cloud adoption? We’ve identified five leading practices for businesses to thrive in the cloud post-migration—allowing them to move from just adopting new technology to thinking differently about what the cloud can bring them and leveraging it. We call this the mastery continuum of practice.
1. Pursue business and industry advantage: Organizations must realign their cloud investments with their business strategies and identify industry-specific use case to solve immediately.
2. Architecting and Orchestrating the Cloud Continuum: Organizations must architect for the new complexities in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, incorporating capabilities and services ranging from public to private to edge and beyond between.
3. Unlock value from data and artificial intelligence: Organizations must properly leverage data to gain new insights, deliver better customer and employee experiences, reshape their operational processes, and drive the next Wave product and market growth.
4. Reimagine operating models and people: Organizations must focus on transforming their skills at every level and processes – from the way individuals and teams work to the organizational environment and culture. Business policies, processes and procedures can and should change to accommodate new cloud enablers.
5. Mastering Cloud Economics: Organizations must redesign their economic processes to become continuous and agile to control cloud spending, while also shifting the mindset from technology cost to technology value.
Living in your dream home is more than just packing, moving and unpacking. Neither is thriving in the cloud. Mastering continuous practices helps companies move beyond mere migration to successfully adopt new ways of operating and winning.
More articles by Greg Douglass of Accenture
