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A Guide to Persuade Your Entire Organization to Embrace the Cloud
We don’t need to educate people about cloud anymore. The technological aspects of cloud migration, such as choosing a hybrid cloud or omni cloud model, and running serverless applications that are cloud-native, are oft-talked about.
And yet, Gartner predicts that lack of cloud skills will delay organizations’ cloud adoption process by two or more years.
When it comes to convincing apprehensive members of your organization that cloud adoption is a necessary step for digital transformation, you have to deal with two different groups:
- Skeptical board members &
- Reluctant employees
Here’s a guide on how you can do it:
1) Audit Existing Applications
Before you embark on the cloud migration journey, the first step is to audit your existing IT infrastructure. Find out the bottlenecks of your existing system, and causes for operational issues and delays. Assessing your applications will help you identify what needs to be changed immediately, and what can be continued to be put to good use. A complete re-engineering of the entire organization’s technology infrastructure might not always be required. Sometimes, retaining some applications as-is might save a lot of time and resource.
2) Present Business Needs
When discovery and assessment of your existing infrastructure is complete, it will give you a better understanding of technological gaps and issues that require addressing. This will help you formulate a business case that specifically meets your organization’s needs. There are multiple business benefits to migration such as decreased IT spending for infrastructure, software and maintenance, and improved security, accessibility and process streamlining.
3) Explain Risks
The necessity for future proofing businesses has never been more realised than since *you-know-what* happened. Explain to your stakeholders about how failing to innovate could potentially bring your business to a standstill during unforeseen circumstances. Also explain the risks of being the business that’s left behind without modernizing while all your competitors advance with the aid of technology.
4) Identify Pain Points
When people are reluctant to trust new technology, there’s often a valid reason behind it. Members of the older generation may feel that they do not have the skills and abilities to quickly embrace the technology change. It’s important to deliver a solution that is not too complex for use, and when the new tools or applications directly meet their needs, many members of your organizations will readily embrace the change.
Not providing adequate training to all your members could also be another issue that might slow down the process. Include orientation and training programs as a part of your migration strategy, and also provide simple guides for people to refer to until they get used to the new system.
5) Throw Light on Individual Benefits
For the business stakeholders, decrease in spending, increase in profits, better security, higher productivity & operational efficiency and enterprise mobility are very appealing benefits.
For other users, the ability for collaborations anywhere, anytime and from any device, empowering them to truly work from anywhere might be a solid benefit that draws them in.
6) Build a Shared Vision
Cloud adoption might mean different things to people in varying levels across the organization. While helping your team members understand what the benefits of cloud adoption for them may be, it’s also important to build a big-picture of how the modernization project will impact the entire organization as a whole.
Building a shared vision not only means creating a roadmap with your success outlined, it also means creating a project where every team and individual is included. That can be achieved by assigning ownerships to everyone, and including every user from inception till the end. When each person bears a little bit of the weight of the huge initiative of cloud migration, the entire process will seem easy and effortless.
