Overview
“Transitions to cloud in organisations happen out of view of the CIO”
Partner contribution to cloud transformation starts with proper partner selection & contracting, followed by ongoing partner alignment in three different areas: transformation alignment, portfolio alignment, operational alignment?
Transformation alignment is about involving and motivating external partners to focus on increasing the efficiency of the cloud transformation, contributing to the overall strategic goals. Periodically, representatives of the most strategic partners should come together to receive status and progress updates on the cloud transformation and to discuss governance mechanisms, opportunities to collaborate and address problems, for example in integration. ?
The cloud services, platforms and the offerings of partners and cloud service providers change rapidly, and as mentioned, often outside the influence of the CIO. With no single oversight, there’s risks that systems, processes and interests will no longer fit together properly. Communication and alignment between Business and IT has been proven crucial in preventing and solving problems that stem from these risks. This is part of portfolio alignment, which involves keeping track of changes in portfolios, selecting which services are offered to the organisation and which are not. Furthermore, offering overlapping services from multiple partners or CSPs should be prevented.?
In day-to-day operations, operational alignment between the organisation and the strategic partners must be established. This concerns aligning on processes such as release and change management or cloud solution development. This is not a one-off activity just for initial implementations. It should be a process of continuous improvement to arrive at operational excellence.
Activities checklist
Initial:
- Creating overview of strategic partners and suppliers and map their interest and power?
- Determining and implementing a process to perform transformation alignment?
- Visualising the current cloud portfolio?
- Creating a way-of-working or process to perform cloud product and portfolio management?
- Drafting proposals on how to collaborate with partners and cloud service providers to perform operational alignment
Recurring:
- Systematic tracking of changes made by cloud service providers?
- Performing frequent impact analysis of the partner and cloud service provider landscape and address anomalies
RASCI
| cloud consultant | supporting | transformation consultant | |
| cloud architect | consulting | cloud partners | |
| cloud security specialist | DevOps team | ||
| cloud developer | business stakeholder | ||
| cloud engineer | architecture | ||
| cloud analyst | supporting | security | |
| product owner CCoE | responsible | finance | |
| management | accountable | procurement |