Cloud Roadmap
Cloud
Roadmap
Follow technology best practices
Cloud Solutions are a new technology - and any cloud roadmap should leverage best practices used for other technologies and be an integral part of the overall business and IT strategy.
Which initiatives are not meeting business needs today?
A few things are unique about a Cloud Roadmap, based on the unique advantages that cloud solutions can offer. Your Cloud Roadmap should take advantage of the shorter time to value, the lower cost of projects and total ownership and the greater ease-of-use by identifying the business functions, organizational entities and ultimately projects best suited for Cloud Solutions, resulting in the best Return-on-Investment.
To avoid a multi-month strategy development, a Cloud Roadmap session can focus on known projects that are currently at risk of taking too long, are not feasible due to high expenses or are likely to fail (or have previously failed) due to poor user acceptance.
Which Initiatives are facing technology constraints?
From this list, all initiatives that are constrained by business issues, for example lack of management support, should be eliminated. While Cloud Solutions are typically less challenging than comparable on-premise solutions, they are no magic wand. By focusing on initiatives that were previously facing technology constraints, the cloud initiatives will achieve the biggest impact!
Develop an aggressive Cloud Solution roadmap!
The cloud initiatives can then be prioritized into a cloud roadmap. For each of them, the key business results targeted need to be defined as cost improvement, quality improvement or cycle time improvement - not a wish list of things that could be better and would make everybody happy! Next, the desired completion date needs to be defined. The single, key advantage of cloud solutions is speed to value - so if the target date is more than 6 months away, the initiative needs to be broken down into manageable components or the roadmap is just not aggressive enough yet.
For each of the initiatives, a business owner needs to be identified. It should be the manager who will reap the rewards of the project - and should therefor own the project, timeline and resources to achieve them!
Finally, the different initiatives should be included in one solution roadmap, incorporating a draft integration into the existing landscape. The organizational impact of the roadmap should be discussed prior to initiating the execution of the roadmap.
Cloud
Roadmap
Get started today - you can start the transformation of your organization leveraging cloud solutions today. Contact us to review the approach remotely via WebEx as a first step. A Cloud Roadmap workshop with key business representatives can take as little as 1 day, delivering the first tangible results quickly. Contact us!
Find out how other companies have transformed their business and delivered value quickly. Read Cloud Success Stories