The Cloud; Ready or not?

By Bill Benedict

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Chances are that you’re already in the Cloud, perhaps a DevOps instance, Office 365, or how about your CRM?    

So the question is not why the Cloud? But rather how do I successfully integrate the Cloud into my strategy and environment?

Your business requires meaningful innovations that enable you to maintain a competitive advantage, a successful new product launch, or perhaps pursuit of an M&A strategy. At the core of the strategy to grow your business, and main concern of many senior executives, is the ability to run the business and the Cloud is a force multiplier when it comes to delivering a scalable solution.  

The Cloud’s open 7x24x365 and has real time solutions that can be on line immediately.  You may be asking yourself, is this an instant fix?  A get rich overnight internet scheme?  or is there more to it?

The approach:

A measured approach is a requirement,  the right heuristics, data, facts and change management methodology are critical in any successful project, now if there was just an equation that we could use to predict the ability to change, perhaps  Data + Facts/ Culture = change rate.  Only if it were this easy, nonetheless it does illustrate the fact that we must take a lot of factors into consideration, many outside of your sphere of control, to migrate to the Cloud successfully.

Unintended benefits:

So following this methodology can provide an additional benefit to the business.  I have personally seen an organization back a “winning business strategy” because they believed that offering was their most profitable but only later to find through an assessment project that their data was not clean, nor complete, and once the facts were assembled it turns out that they were embracing a different strategy, a going out of business strategy. It was realized that the total cost associated with their offering outweighed their profits.  This cleansing effect now provided senior leadership with not only clean data but options to provision the work to the right provider and utilizing partners to evaluate, design and manage their business.

Conclusion:

What is in it for me? The ability to transform your organization to a scalable solution, without the heavy investment in infrastructure, getting world class IT performance in a variable cost model can enable you, your organization to thrive in an a time where decisioning must be closer to results than ever before.

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