Lead your organisation to a cloudy future. Transform it. Re-invent it. Prepare it for any future ahead! Supercharge your cloud adoption with The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap!

This article is part of the limited preview of the “The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap”, a generic roadmap for any enterprise cloud adoption programme.

1. Executive Summary
2. The Cloud and Enterprises
3. The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap
4. A Cloudy Future

A Cloudy Future

The arrival of the cloud in our personal lives has transformed the way we consume services. And sometimes, even our lives. From endless hours of entertainment to instant communication around the globe, the cloud by now underpins large parts of our modern service offerings world.

Customer driven companies use the cloud to rapidly experiment with new offerings without having to worry about being slowed down by failed experiments. They are able to leverage elastic cloud resources that scale with their business needs — not the other way around.

The cloud has democratised infrastructure for technology-first businesses. And it keeps on pushing those changes further up the stack.

All those leveraging the cloud, are able to play in the same league as the technology titans. The only real limiting factor here is the monthly bill. Entire businesses are now “born in the cloud”. They never physically own a single server. Yet they serve the world and are very healthy organisations.

The use of cloud by market contenders and disruptors also had a significant impact on the broader business landscape. Traditional companies that don’t want to be outpaced or even marginalised are exploring routes to unleash the powers of the cloud within the bounds of their corporate organisations.

However, migrating a business to the cloud is hard, even harder for highly regulated businesses. Especially, when striving for a seamless integration into the existing corporate ecosystem.

On par with the grande potential of the cloud is the impact its adoption has on the entire organisation.

A cloud adoption transforms an organisation as it touches almost every aspect of the organisation. A cloud adoption has and creates deep and complex dependency chains. A cloud adoption is exposed to serious risks that may severely delay its successful completion.

Most enterprises use a structured approach to investigating and subsequently adopting the cloud, usually in the form of a dedicated cloud programme with a systematic roadmap.

This article series introduced The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap, a generic roadmap for any enterprise cloud adoption programme.

It provides a systematic, comprehensive, incremental, and data driven approach that makes the grande task of adopting the cloud more controllable and its outcome much more predictable. Iterative in its very nature, it works by

1. Clearly articulating the vision as a business case
2. Starting, staffing, and securing the success of the cloud programme
3. Iteratively building the delivery pipeline of suitable applications, tools, and teams
4. Iteratively executing the delivery pipeline in small and time-bound iterations that are incremental in complexity

While not being foolproof and still requiring a fair amount of adaption to a specific use case, The Missing Cloud Programme Roadmap seriously increases the chances of organisations successfully adopting the cloud. Moreover, it also serves as a spark that hopefully ignites further industry-wide collaboration.

Adopting the cloud can seem like a herculean endeavour. Humbleness for the task ahead and incorporating key factors for a successful cloud programme eventually leads the organisation into a cloudy future. Combined with other organisational transformation programmes, this allows to re-invent the organisation and prepare it for any future ahead.

So, How Do You Adopt the Cloud?!

While the above Worx for Me!™ when it comes to designing, planning, and executing a generic roadmap for any enterprise cloud adoption programme, you may have an alternative or better way.

Think this is all rubbish, massively overrated, or generally heading into the absolutely wrong direction?! Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and teach me something new!

As always, prove me wrong and I’ll buy you a pint!

Acknowledgements

The author would like to especially thank Claudio Moreno for long and insightful discussions. As well as his prolonged patience and invaluable feedback, built on decades of real-life experience, while proof reading early versions of this article series.

Claudio — you might be my fiercest critic (and you definitely possess the power to annoy me with that at times) but then you are also my most valuable critic. Keeping me honest. Keeping me focussed. Much, much appreciated, my friend!