Looking at the big picture for a successful transformation

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

Cloud transformation inspires me with the Indian fable of the six blind men and the rajah: he shows them an elephant and asks them to touch and describe it. One of them touches an ear and thinks it is a fan. The second one touches the side of the animal and says it is like a strong wall. The others touch a tusk, a knee, the trunk, and the tail of the elephant. They imagine a spear, a tree, a snake, and a rope. The rajah then explains to the six men that they are all right: putting their descriptions together gives an accurate representation of an elephant.

Just like the pachyderm, the idea of the cloud differs between the stakeholders. During the discussions with his CEO, the CDO insists on digital transformation or data. The businesses, however, focus on innovation and development of the services. The director of operations thinks of resilience, the chief financial officer (CFO) aims at optimization of OPEX/CAPEX costs, and the HRD cares about business development. As for the IT department, they see the cloud as a means to efficiency and agility to support the business.

Three principles for successful adoption

Give meaning to the transformation: what business challenges?

Imagining a cloud transformation project means above all building a corporate transformation plan driven by its global challenges. The objectives sought can be vary:

Develop new applications more quickly by leveraging the technological innovations of the major cloud players on the market
Increase market shares in coordination with a digital approach or a geographic expansion
Take advantage of the resilience inherent to the infrastructures of the public cloud players
Standardize the IS, make it agile and flexible, for example to promote integrations or divestitures of businesses
Increase financial efficiency by varying IT operational costs and reducing investment in CAPEX.

Among the errors encountered on migration projects, the most common ones consist in considering only a single aspect. Some people see adoption of the cloud as a digital experimentation project: later on, they will struggle to move to full scale. Others see it only as an infrastructure project: they will limit themselves to replacing the datacenters by the resources of a local cloud host or a hyperscaler and, consequently, will be of no interest to the business. In short, the success of a cloud project relies on a global vision, involving both the adoption by the business and the use of all the economic levers of transformation.

The company’s strategic intention also determines whether the transformation will take place smoothly

With a broad and multidisciplinary understanding of the cloud, transformation choices can be aligned according to the preferred angle, without neglecting the other aspects. Thus, if a digital transformation is the priority, the accent will be placed on the adoption of cloud-native services and containerization. But if a highly financial angle is preferred, roadmaps for the consolidation of clean infrastructures can be accelerated.

A cloud transformation project must be balanced, informed, and driven by the overall strategic intent. The selected approach will have to place various cursors in the right positions:

Adoption of cloud native innovations and reversibility effort
Speed and depth of transformation of the application portfolio
Openness to an ecosystem and control of trust and sovereignty
Investment and horizon of the ROI in the transformation.

Do not underestimate the organizational impact

Thinking of the cloud solely as a technological platform also limits the business results of the transformation. Operational agility, innovation, and efficiency involve much more than just the use of a new technology: they assume a transformation of the culture and the adoption of modern methods. They are highly present in the disciplines of product management and application development; with the cloud, their vocation is to extend to all IT domains.

In this respect, the transformation on a “people/process/platform” model applies more than ever and leads to:

New platforms and new consumption models involving new applications by the businesses and development teams
A new culture of IT and security operations management based on product, agile, and DevSecOps approaches
A new approach to systematic automation and new skills needed to support it.

By nature, the cloud is multifaceted; its adoption involves the entire organization. Considering it as a lever for transformation of the entire company and alignment between the different functions is the best way to maximize its value.

To find out how Capgemini can help guide you through this important process, download our Cloud Transformation: The Keys to Success whitepaper, or contact our team today.