"Cloud technology has become a fundamental component for public organizations, enabling them to improve services and achieve their mission efficiently. However, this shift also requires a change in organizational structure and technical executive coordination to fully leverage the benefits of cloud technology."
CIOs have experienced limited funding and under delivery from technology providers. They have embarked on complex business cloud transformation, but the technology complexities has led to frustration, missed targets, unexpected cost, lengthening schedules and worse, not realizing the expected ROI. Tech Executives have become afraid to jump into transformative ventures especially after their political capital has been significantly shaken after proposed digital transformations have failed.
The frequent ask was: Would the journey pay back my leadership and stewardship? Do I want to be responsible for a fixing something that may not be broken?
Three core cloud services where respondents are achieving measurable value are data a analytics, cloud cyber, and software elasticity using containers and container orchestration. These services are most aligned to value goals such as cost optimization, increasing efficiency and agility, and mitigating business regulatory risk. Therefore, organizations that want to optimize or preserve and protect value would be best served to consider these capabilities as part of their strategy. Cloud native and container-based approaches can be added to enable greater success with value goals such as the desire to expand into new markets. Importantly, organizations seeing greater value from these services are not spending significantly more on the cloud. In fact, their annual cloud investment averages ~US$27 million—which is just ~US$2 million more annually than respondents overall.
Think big starting small. Deloitte initiative starts with a detailed understanding of the current state the transformation objectives and then demonstrating value from experimentation. We help our clients to develop the business case details in concrete and measurable ways to scale the transformation in a successful manner. We help to define the objectives, levers and KPIs for the initiative.
Smart Factory
Cloud optimization is a path, not a destination
Cloud optimization can sound like the answer to a math problem. Solve for X, and you have optimal cloud usage. But with cloud being more and more integral to how organizations achieve their missions, cloud optimization is a mindset, a way of doing business more than a particular outcome or correct answer.
To get started on that journey, organizations should:
Define metrics for mission effectiveness. Setting mission metrics and gathering appropriate data to measure them is often the first step toward finding new tools, new processes, and even entirely new services to improve mission accomplishment.
Create a cross-functional council to oversee cloud investments. By bringing together IT and mission leaders, relationships can be formed which can lay the foundation for close collaboration on future projects.
Monitor cloud usage and add those metrics to financial reports. Combining the technical and financial picture of cloud is an important first step toward FinOps. That way organizations can begin to manage finances on the same short timelines they manage technical decisions, rather than waiting for the end of the fiscal year.
Bake climate, equity, and other considerations into business decisions. For example, creating climate impact criteria in cloud acquisition decisions could help uncover when a marginal improvement to a service may not be worth the significant increase in emissions it would cause.
Optimizing cloud should mean optimizing the mission value of an organization. The rapid change in the use of cloud means that government organizations have a unique opportunity to change how they deliver value to constituents. If done well, cloud optimization could lead to an operationally well-organized and financially sound organization that achieves its mission while adhering to sustainability standards.
Transform your cloud to a business enablement platform and assess your cloud spending strategy and transform your business.