Going to the cloud? Make sure you’ve packed enough leadership and thought

Surely by now we must know how to enact transformation within large organisations. We obtain loads of funding, appoint the programme director, set up the PMO, build the programme plan, set up governance and so on and so on.

If, like me, you have lived through many such large transformation programmes, your heart may sink at thought of all of the paraphernalia of change. All those things are important (it’s hard to organise lots of people to do complicated things, and hard to get them to stay organised), but they are necessary rather than sufficient. Have you ever attempted a transformation programme where you set up all the necessary mechanics, and yet the programme failed to fire? The processes were there, but the momentum required to sustain true change was never achieved?

I believe that there are essential characteristics of transformation which are often missed when setting up large initiatives, and that these are particularly important for cloud transformation: leadership, thought, empowerment, balance and persistence. These things matter for cloud because, if you succeed, you will fundamentally change the way you manage technology in your organisation (and if that’s not the outcome of your cloud programme, perhaps you should look at the goals of that programme again).

Let’s look at two of these in a bit more detail: leadership and thought.

Leadership

Leadership is not just sponsorship. Leadership is not just being in charge. Leadership is not just receiving reports and making decisions.

Many years ago, I learnt a lesson about leadership from my friend and ex-colleague, Balasubramanian Ganesh. Ganesh was leading an enormous programme to integrate two big banks. When I described a problem with a team that was not delivering successfully, he asked me a question: ‘Do they have visible, engaged leadership?’ He asked this question about most teams, no matter what problems they were having. This focus helped me understand that an effective leader is engaged and active with their team, shares their goals, and has more at stake than they do: they are prepared to take a personal career risk to achieve difficult outcomes.

This is particularly important for a cloud transformation programme because, if pursued with ambition, such a programme will disrupt organisational structures, change ways of working, shift control and risk mechanisms. There will be setbacks and disappointments as well as successes. There will be skepticism and a temptation to give up. Visible, engaged leadership (combined with empowerment, balance and persistence) is needed to keep on going.

To make this practical, as part of your cloud strategy, you should identify the key leadership roles and the people who will occupy them, asking hard questions about whether these people have or will grow the necessary leadership attributes. This article on key leadership roles for cloud transformation may help.

Thought

Doesn’t it go without saying that everything in the world of technology needs thought? After all, technology workers are knowledge workers: they are paid to figure things out. Yet the world of technology often seems to be muddled and confused.

Pick any large transformation programme you have worked on. Was every decision clear? Was the process of decision making clear? Was it possible to solve difficult problems? Was there a good reason for all the work that was going on? Was there a good reason for all the work that wasn’t going on?

If your experience is anything like mine, you will have found that much of the effort on large programmes is spent trying to unravel tangled chains of thought. You may also have found that much effort is also expended on avoiding thinking too hard about difficult questions of why and how, but rather to just keep on going.

Thought cannot be avoided when you are moving to cloud. Strategic moves to cloud are complex transformation programmes. Although it has been around for years, cloud is still relatively new compared to most enterprise technologies. Cloud platforms and products are evolving all the time, as is the relationship between cloud platform providers and other technology providers. Legislators, industry bodies and regulators are all figuring out what they think about cloud, and what it means for cloud providers to run the infrastructure of critical parts of industries and economies.

It’s complicated.

This is why, when attempting a strategic move to cloud, it’s particularly important to get your thinking straight, and to share and test that thinking with a wide stakeholder group. When you move to cloud, you are moving the systems that run your enterprise into a new home. You had better make sure that everybody knows how this new home works and what it is going to be like to live there.

To make this practical, when planning a move to cloud, it’s a good idea to list out all of the hard questions - the questions that it’s difficult even to frame. What does multi-cloud really mean? What would actually happen if the cloud provider failed, and is that sufficiently likely for you to worry about? How far are you really going to go? What does it mean to commit to a strategic partner for many years? And then, when you think you have answered these questions, to test whether you have achieved real clarity, or whether you still have work to do. (In a future article, I’ll try to list some of the hard questions about cloud.)

But even if your travel bag for the cloud is full of leadership and thought, you still need more: next week, I’ll try to tackle to topics of empowerment, balance and persistence.