Organizational readiness is the main theme when asking the how questions. Does the company have the skills in-house? Are accounting and finance willing and able to shift from a
capital expenditure (buying up front) model to an operational expenditure (pay-as-you-go) model? What is the mind-set of the culture? Are they resisisting the change? Are they capable of change?
Organizational change management is critical to the success of any transformational change initiative within a company. Whether a company is trying to implement a new business strategy, a new development methodology, or adopt new technologies, there is always the element of organizational change that must be addressed. In many cases, the change is more challenging than the new technology or the new strategy that is being implemented.
People need to understand why change is necessary and how that change will improve things in the future. John Kotter, the author of numerous books on organizational change management, categorized the following eight errors common to organizational change efforts:
1. Allowing too much complacency
2. Failing to create a powerful guiding coalition 3. Underestimating the importance of a vision 4. Undercommunicating the vision
5. Allowing obstacles to block the vision 6. Failing to create short wins
7. Declaring victory too soon
8. Neglecting to make changes part of corporate culture A common mistake that I have seen through the years is that companies often neglect to involve human resources (HR) in the process. New initiatives often require a change in behaviors, but if the HR processes still reward the old
behaviors and do nothing to encourage the new desired behaviors, then there are no incentives for employees to change.
AEA Case Study: Dealing with Change
John Stanford is the vice president of Infrastructure at AEA. He started at AEA 15 years ago as a systems administrator and worked his way up to his current position. He has hired many of the people on his current staff, including the two security experts that report to him. Many of the people on John’s team are not supportive of the company’s goal to leverage the cloud for the new platform. They continue to raise issues about security, stability, and lack of control that come with the cloud. John manages the budget for all of the infrastructure and is already planning for a new project to expand to another data center in two years because the current data center is nearing capacity. John is well aware of the costs and the incredible amount of labor required to build out another data center. Leveraging the cloud seems to make a lot of sense to John, but how can he get his people on board? John starts holding one-on-one meetings with his staff members to discuss their thoughts on cloud computing. What he discovers is that many of his staff members are afraid that their jobs might be going away. When John explains the business benefits of leveraging the cloud, the staff immediately shifts focus to building a private cloud regardless if that deployment model is the best fit for the business. John realizes he needs to provide a new set of incentives in order to motivate his staff differently. So John challenges them to reduce costs of archiving all of the back-office applications by 50 percent over the next six months. He gives them a directive to eliminate tape and disk backup and move all
backups for these systems to a cloud storage solution. By giving his staff ownership in the change process and by giving them a project that directly impacts their day-to-day job in a positive way, John increases the odds that his team will adapt over time. Nobody on his team will miss backup tapes and devices. This is a much better introduction to cloud computing than having the development team force them into supporting their cloud aspirations. John changed his staff’s incentive to drive the desired outcome. He tied the project to a business objective and made it an achievable goal on their objectives. Now it is up to John to stay on top of his team and continue to drive the change forward.
Companies that have a long legacy of building and deploying on-premises systems are likely to experience resistance within the ranks. No matter how good the IT team may be when it comes to building software, without buy-in throughout the organization, delivering in the cloud will be a challenge. Don’t forget to address the how question.
Summary
As with implementing any technology, it is highly recommended to focus first on defining the architecture before rushing to decisions on vendors and cloud service models. It is important that the technology decisions are driven mainly from business drivers rather than technology preferences. Ask the who, what, why, where, when, and how questions early in the project so that informed decisions can be made about cloud service models and deployment models. Understand the constraints, both artificial and real, up front before decisions are made. By no way does this
recommendation dictate the process in which an organization answers these questions. On the surface it might sound like I am recommending a waterfall approach, which I am not. Agile practitioners can work these discovery tasks into their sprints in any fashion that they like. The point is that these discovery questions should be asked and the answers should have an impact on the design decisions and ultimately the overall architecture.
References
Kendall, K., and J. Kendall (2003). Systems Analysis and Design, 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Kotter, John P. (1996). Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Ross, J., P. Weill, and D. Robertson (2006). Enterprise Architecture as a Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Ross, J., Weill, P. (2004). IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Schekkerman, Jaap. (2008). Enterprise Architecture Good Practices Guide: How to Manage the Enterprise Architecture Practice. Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford Publishing.
Galexa Consulting. (2013). “BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard: A Blueprint for Economic Opportunity.”
Retrieved from http://portal.bsa.org/cloudscorecard2012/ assets/PDFs/BSA_GlobalCloudScorecard.pdf.
Whittaker, Z. (2012, December 4). “Patriot Act Can Obtain Data in Europe, Researchers Say.” Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/8301–205_162–57556674/