Define your cloud strategy team
This article outlines the process for defining your cloud strategy team. A cloud strategy team or function defines the motivations and business objectives for cloud adoption and transformation projects. These functions validate and maintain alignment between business priorities and cloud adoption efforts.
Establishing a motivation-driven strategy helps you map and align the initiatives with the desired business objectives. The cloud strategy team helps facilitate the alignment between the business and the adoption initiatives.
Why do I need a cloud strategy team?
Consider these reasons for establishing a cloud strategy team:
- Align business and IT objectives. Ensure that your cloud initiatives are purpose-driven, are tied to your motivations, and address specific business needs and priorities.
- Improve strategic decision making. Bring diverse perspectives to evaluate cloud capabilities and select solutions that are aligned with organizational goals.
- Accelerate cloud transformation. Streamline the adoption process by creating a cohesive roadmap and clear ownership of initiatives.
- Reduce operational risks. Identify and mitigate potential challenges in security, compliance, and governance.
- Enhance innovation and flexibility. Foster a collaborative environment that encourages innovative uses of cloud technology and increases responsiveness to market changes.
Recommended functions
To successfully implement a cloud strategy team and help your business realize value from your cloud investments, consider including the following functions in your cloud strategy team. You can start small and expand the team over time. Start by consulting stakeholders from across the organization and add more functions to your adoption strategy team as necessary.
Here's a list of typical functions and their relevance for a cloud adoption strategy:
- Central IT helps manage operational efficiency, optimizes IT resources, prepares the technical platforms, and ensures the scalability and availability of cloud services.
- Business decision makers (BDM) ensure that cloud strategies drive business value and align with revenue generation, customer engagement, and operational goals.
- IT decision makers (ITDM) bridge the gap between technology and business. They help balance technological feasibility with business needs and ensure that new solutions align with existing IT frameworks and capabilities.
- Lead architects translate the business objectives into technical architectures that ensure cloud solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, and adaptable.
- Cloud security teams help ensure that you protect your data end systems. They ensure that new initiatives follow security standards to reduce the risks that are associated with cloud adoption.
- Compliance teams minimize legal and compliance risks. They help ensure that all cloud practices meet regulatory and organizational compliance standards.
- Financial teams. Consider including representatives from financial teams to help inform the IT and business decision makers about the opportunities and risks of cloud investments.
- Executives provide top-down support and strategic oversight. Including someone from your leadership team or executive stakeholders can help drive organizational commitments to ensure that cloud adoption aligns with the company’s overall mission and strategic objectives.
Seek input
Your cloud strategy team should continuously seek input from across the business. Consider ensuring alignment and seeking input from these additional teams and personas:
- Finance leadership guides budgeting, cost management, and financial planning. They help maximize the return on cloud investments by ensuring financial efficiency and compliance with corporate financial policies.
- Marketing shapes brand reputation and customer engagement strategies. They ensure that cloud capabilities support customer acquisition, retention, and digital marketing initiatives to enhance overall brand image.
- Sales drives revenue growth and builds customer relationships. They align cloud solutions with sales goals to help streamline sales processes, boost efficiency, and improve customer lifetime value.
- Human resources (HR) provides insights and support that directly influence the success and sustainability of the transformation. If you have recruitment, re-skilling, or workforce planning requirements because of new areas for innovation, HR is a crucial partner.
- Executive leadership helps you meet market growth requirements and environmental sustainability metrics.
- Sustainability leads drive sustainability as part of the cloud strategy throughout the business, ensuring sustainability is aligned with the company's environmental commitments.
Recommendations
Start small and expand. Define the core members of the initial team. Core members at this stage typically include IT, finance, and security. Seek input from other functions as necessary for the first iterations of your strategy.
Define the role of your strategy team. Ensure that you map your business requirements and objectives to the operational responsibility of the cloud adoption strategy team. A clear accountability structure helps when you communicate organizational changes or invest in new initiatives to enhance your cloud maturity.
Review the strategy team memberships. Regularly review the strategy team to ensure that you have representation across the business and that you have the right stakeholders and collaborators involved. Doing so helps uncover both opportunities and risks. Both should be fairly represented as the strategy evolves.
Iterate on your strategy. Create an initial strategy draft with your core team, consulting with business leaders and stakeholders. Use the first iteration to explore business goals that you can achieve through cloud adoption. When you have executive support to proceed, expand the scope and detail of your strategy team as necessary.