When it comes to cloud solutions, do any of these statements sound familiar?
- “Moving to the cloud is easy. All you need is connectivity and a credit card to get started.”
- “Moving to the cloud was easy, but now that it’s actually providing value to our company, IT and procurement want to control it. I’m not even a system admin any more.”
- “Cloud isn’t much different from other platforms. We still need to consider governance, change control, project management, user training, etc.”
Question: Who’s right? Who’s wrong?
Perficient Answer: Essentially, they’re all right.
Each of the opinions reflects where each person is in their adoption of the cloud. I like to use the analogy of a soap box cart.
At first…
- It was so easy to get started.
- You found a solution to meet your needs and budget.
- You charged it on your credit card and did some basic setup.
- You were a hero to the people in your department, and life was good.
Then…
- You started to see how fast this thing could go.
- Why settle, you say? Let’s broaden it to include more use cases.
- Let’s get more users involved.
- Users are loving it, and it’s getting harder to hide the credit card charges for additional licenses from accounting.
- Too many system administrators. Need to reign in control. Some mistakes are being made.
- IT wants to be involved.
- The cart needs brakes, bumpers, and signals. The circuit needs better security, permissions, and lighting. We need rules of the road.
- The maverick days are over.
And next…
- Managed chaos morphed into managed order.
- More people, processes, and steps were involved but there were fewer crashes.
- Everything worked better together.
- You won more races.
- The hero was back.
While the analogy is intentionally tongue in cheek, there are parallels to the cloud adoption maturity model. Many companies start with a small number of users, and maybe even with lower editions of a cloud-based solution, but generally over time, adoption and needs increase and the user count and edition trend upwards, also.
So what does it all mean?
Closing thoughts:
- No one phase is inherently better than another.
- All phases are good if they’re appropriate to what an organization needs, what it can afford, and what it can support.
- The important point is to be able to recognize when it’s time to act and adopt a different ownership and governance model. When that time comes you know that you have done something right. You have created something of value that people want to ensure continues.
