Cloud Innovation: Reactive Responder – Deloitte On Cloud Blog | Deloitte US has been saved
According to Deloitte’s annual 2021 Resilience study, 70% of CxOs surveyed don’t have confidence in their organization’s ability to pivot and adapt to disruptive events. In a world of constant and inevitable change, the most resilient organizations are prepared, adaptable, collaborative, trustworthy, and responsible. However, being able to pivot quickly while maintaining these characteristics requires having the right business operations, technology infrastructure, and workforce strategy in place to easily adjust, automate, and streamline work processes wherever possible.
Take the following fictional example. CEO Ana Pardo had to manage business and workforce operations in the face of a severe storm. Intelligent automation powered by the cloud was there to enable business continuity, redistribute work, and reroute customer service requests in response to fast-changing business needs. Her organization’s proactive, responsive infrastructure knew what controls were in place and what activity looked unusual—like the threat of a hacking collective striking during the storm. The cloud allowed her to innovate seamless, data-driven operations.
The cloud has an important role to play in this scenario focused on resilient operations and data-driven automation. We call this cloud innovation scenario the reactive responder. A focus for many CEOs, chief human resources officers (CHROs), and chief operating officers (COOs), this scenario will require organizations to prioritize data-driven internal operations over external experiences to achieve greater operational efficiencies.
Business and technology strategies for the reactive responder
The reactive responder’s cloud innovation strategy focuses on four key business outcomes.
Given these business requirements, the reactive responder’s cloud innovation program would benefit from:
Innovating the future with the cloud
Importantly, the reactive responder is just one of many future cloud scenarios. While a priority for many organizations, there will be a number of other initiatives where the CIO, CTO, and chief cloud officer will be called upon to support business innovation. And, while becoming more agile, more responsive, and more secure should be a focus for every organization, finding complementary business priorities with aligning technical requirements can add value to the planning process.
To achieve this, a new framing for cloud innovation is needed to help organizations assess overlapping business drivers (IT operations, data, customer experience, and digital ecosystems) and similar technical requirements across various cloud programs to better align strategies and create economies of scale from investment, resource, and infrastructures created in service of those strategies.
To learn more about aligning your organization’s future cloud initiatives across business and technical requirements, visit our Deloitte Insights article, “A new framing for cloud innovation” or Deloitte On Cloud blog post “Four scenarios for cloud innovation,” and don’t miss our upcoming post, “Cloud innovation: Becoming an experience innovator.”
As the chief cloud strategy officer for Deloitte Consulting LLP, David is responsible for building innovative technologies that help clients operate more efficiently while delivering strategies that enable them to disrupt their markets. David is widely respected as a visionary in cloud computing—he was recently named the number one cloud influencer in a report by Apollo Research. For more than 20 years, he has inspired corporations and start-ups to innovate and use resources more productively. As the author of more than 13 books and 5,000 articles, David’s thought leadership has appeared in InfoWorld, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, Gigaom, and Lynda.com. Prior to joining Deloitte, David served as senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners, where he grew the practice into a major force in the cloud computing market. Previously, he led Blue Mountain Labs, helping organizations find value in cloud and other emerging technologies. He is a graduate of George Mason University.