We live in a world where everything is changing almost every day, meaning the demand for change is increasing more than ever before. All the businesses are going through heavy competition as to who is the fastest to get into the market. It’s almost become clear now that the fastest win, just like the race! That can be even a start-up creates competition with well established large scale enterprises.
Yes, you get it, an enterprise competing with a startup on speed, are we kidding, we are talking days or weeks in a startup scenario vs months or even years in an enterprise scenario to roll out a product or even a new feature.
Since the born of public cloud providers, almost all of the startups made use of it and already become established using the public cloud, but there are so many enterprises still continuing the journey with uncertainty to move completely into the cloud.
Regardless of the speed world is moving there is always a firm desire to do the right thing without cutting corners, especially around the enterprise. The people in large enterprises who knows how to do the thing right for their enterprise may not go that faster, but they are critical SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) who know all the compliance requirements to make you achieve the goal without creating an accident, just like the breaks in your car!
The projects normally initiated for a speedy delivery within enterprises try to skip the SMEs and often hit a brick wall before going too far. This is because the business risk is not well understood compared to quick business outcomes. There is always a business risk and the key role of SMEs is to reduce the risk that’s palatable to their enterprise and that is not something to be skipped.
Here you go, coming from an engineering background in IT what engineering taught me on engineering compliance is all over in IT and Cloud. I have subsequently for two decades worked in an enterprise environment and understands expectations around the need for speed never newer and in fact, it’s just getting better realised than before with an unlimited number of challenges coming from even startups!
Those who are coming from similar years of experience might remember user stories and iterations and the birth of agile practices with the introduction of eXtreme Programming (XP), continuous integration practices and test-driven development; These are all were trying to solve the very basic problem of moving faster and unfortunately after two decades we are still trying to solve the same problem, just for a change in someone else’s infrastructure and data centre, yes it’s called Cloud!
In Cloud computing, storage, high-speed networking and speed of adoption are very popular, well, in fact, few of the many marketing tactics used by these public cloud providers, but what about compliance the one thing that is enterprise trying to solve for decades? The word compliance is probably the word that most project managers hate, just because their fear of compliance might slow down their project. Even though keeping compliance requirements satisfied so the business risk kept at low better for enterprises most project always try to take short cuts to speed up the delivery. This results in projects trying to skip engaging with SMEs and end up throwing projects over the fence to the operational teams. The operational teams will have no time other than managing technical debts one after another for the rest of their life hence hard to find time to be an SME for a new project, this slows down the new project!
The Cloud providers are providing more than enough tooling to make migration to Cloud fast as possible, but for enterprises, it’s critical to speed up the Cloud Adoption rather than just Cloud Migration. The Cloud Adoption includes but not limited to compliance adoption at scale so that products and features that get migrated to Cloud can be deployed faster and changed faster to meet the current demand.
My initial focus based on my experience gained will be how we engage those key SMEs starting from operational staff to establish the compliance framework and come up with a design for cloud framework that fits the particular enterprise so that we can handle the very old problem of adopting something new without compromising the compliance requirements and delivery timelines.
Knowing the enterprise environment enough is a critical factor to succeed in any adoption journey. This is even critical than knowing or using cool services and tooling provided by cloud providers as until they are successfully adopted into an enterprise these new tools and services are basically no use for the enterprise or their cloud adoption journey.
I would love to hear from all of those who read my blogs if you want to see more (or less), am I missing something or something completely inaccurate, if I am successful in helping just one of the readers of my blogs take their own Enterprise Cloud adoption in the right direction, I would be more than happy 🙂 and keep on blogging for the coming years!
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