Cloud solutions adoption: a lot like soap box carts.

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.

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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.