A Complex Enterprise Change: AWS Cloud Transformation Management

“When it comes to cloud adoption, the biggest challenge isn't technology - it's the people and processes that must change and adapt” - Forbes

The impact of cloud adoption will affect not only your application workloads but also your organization, business models, HR and procurement processes. Organizations need to examine the influence cloud adoption has on its people, culture, and processes. Culture can be defined as the values, beliefs, and practices that exist in an organization. Culture is critical when it comes to cloud adoption because it will affect an organization’s management and the economics of its IT services.

“Cultural issues are at the root of many failed business transformations, yet most organizations do not assign explicit responsibility for culture” - Gartner

The first step in influencing cultural change is to identify the values required for the organization’s cloud adoption. Once these values are defined, it is crucial to communicate the new operating behaviors and reinforce them explicitly and implicitly by using a reward system. The last step then becomes hiring or selecting the right individuals that are excited to embrace the change and would align the values that you want to drive.

The obstacles that organizations might face as they embark on the journey to the cloud are:

●      Lack of visible and active leadership

●      Lack of change management resourcing

●      Resistance from project teams, middle-level management and fellow employees resulting from the organization’s inertia to change.

Many IT organizations are not used to driving projects with change management in mind. Organizational change management can be defined as applying tools & processes to the people side of change, to transition from a current state to a future state to successfully achieve a particular outcome.

Successful change across an enterprise does not just happen organically. Organizational change first requires individual changes and its normal to experience some reluctance and resistance to change across an organization. The scope and type of change should inform your change management plan, which comes down to selecting the appropriate toolsets for the job at hand.

There are three types of change efforts, namely:

1. Improvement: Focuses in on the changing toolsets.
2. Transitional: This change effort focuses mainly on changing both the toolsets and skillsets.
3. Transformational: The key difference here is that we are looking at the impact and effect changing toolsets & skillsets has on the changing mindsets.

Across the three change efforts, communication, change & project management, training & change leadership are all required solution drivers. Elements such as training & orientation, organization design, HR strategy & support are necessary elements required for a more robust transformational change.

There are 3 phases to tactically applying change management approach to accelerate your cloud transformation.

In the first phase, your team and senior leadership have to be mobilized. The team to lead the change and build the momentum is formed and referred to as the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). The CCoE can consist of a cloud engineering team and a cloud business office team. The program governance structure is shaped, and it is essential to assess and align the change leadership roles.

The second phase is about defining your vision and engaging your organization. The third and final phase is about implementing your changes. After the selection process, the leaders need to articulate and communicate the vision & roadmap for transitioning into the cloud. At this phase, it is essential for leaders to address how the change would affect the employees in the organizations.

Finally, the last phase is about enabling the capacity and ensuring successful cloud transition into the cloud. The objective of this phase is to align IT organization structure, roles, and processes with the AWS platform and too also ensure that cloud benefits and goals are achieved.