Making the move to the cloud is not a small undertaking and it’s advisable that you plan ahead. Talk to your peers, research what other companies are doing, attend key conferences and read as much as you can on the topic. If you haven’t had a chance to read some of my earlier blog posts including Rewards of Moving to Oracle Cloud, Challenges of Cloud Implementations, and Integrating Cloud with Legacy Applications, I hope you’ll set aside some time to do just that. Regardless of company size, a change of this magnitude requires a methodical approach to ensure the best possible outcome. In this two-part series, we’ll outline key steps for success.
1. Assess Your Current Application Footprint
Where do you have the most to gain? Where will migrating to the cloud have the biggest impact? Take a look at your current systems. Where are you struggling? Maybe a single source of the truth seems unattainable due to lack of systems integration with your on-premises systems. Or maybe adhoc reporting capabilities for users is nonexistent, but critical to your plan to reduce dependence upon IT. If financial reporting is a manual process based on spreadsheets, this might be your number-one priority. Chances are, it won’t take much effort for you to identify where you’d like to begin your cloud journey.
2. Confirm a Business Sponsorship/Leadership Team
With a firm idea as to where migrating to the cloud would have the greatest impact, it’s time to build your business case and secure executive management support. It is critical to your project’s success, yet so many projects fail due to this missed step. Make sure you have the right conversations up front regarding strategic objectives, funding, resources, and risks. When you have buy-in from the leadership team, you have an ally that will be a champion for the project, which is especially important if timelines are extended, or more resources are required.
3. Develop a Migration Plan
Your migration plan should work with the company strategy. If that strategy is to take a slow and steady approach to migrating to the cloud, your plan should reflect that, but build in quick wins where appropriate. Map your plan to the success metrics you defined at the onset of the project. Whether your goals are a time savings or reduced reliance on IT, don’t lose sight of what you set out to do.
In a blog post written by my colleague, Suresh Krishnan, Making the Most of Oracle Sales Cloud, he outlined some steps to planning a Sales Cloud project that apply across the board.
“Try to leverage as much out-of-the-box functionality as possible. This does not mean you do not make any application extensions at all; the migration is an opportunity for you to consider enhancements to applications as a result of changes to the business. Focus on making reasonable application extensions, done within the application extensibility tools. One big advantage of deploying enhancements during the migration phase is that only one testing phase for both the migration and enhancement is required. Additionally, there is no down-time impact to the current production environment.
Be prudent in building any customizations that are likely to be addressed by Oracle in a future release. Verify the functionality expected in new releases before committing to develop something custom. Minimizing customizations reduces the associated costs of having to manage custom code.
If you are migrating from an existing application, try to re-implement the processes using the new system and its functions. It is important to make sure you have the functionality that existed earlier, but try to develop the processes around the capabilities of the new system, rather than trying to mimic the prior functionality.”
In part two of this blog post, we’ll cover how to engage with the implementation team as well as how to execute and deploy. In our new guide, we explore the cloud marketplace, key considerations, integrating the cloud with legacy applications, and challenges of current cloud implementations. If you’re considering Oracle Cloud, this guide will provide some clear steps on how to make the move.
