Many businesses who have very technical and functional IT departments fail to understand the full extent of what ‘moving to the cloud’ means, and what value it will bring to their business.

Often, it can lead to a lack of investment in new technologies that will not support future business strategy and ambitions. A lack of vision, fear of change, or simply not believing in the value that the right technology can bring.

It can also lead to uncontrolled costs. Costs that will never make the return on the investment and leave organisations with financial commitments and technical debt that hinder future change, and a future lack of confidence in digital and technology.

The cloud is a journey, not a destination – and navigating this technology with careful consideration is critical to investments, and the success of the projects and programmes that make it happen as well as your future business success.

Independent CIO Advice

Independent CIO experience, not linked to the traditional IT consultancies, enable open and honest conversations with the business and IT teams to support a realistic programme to use the cloud appropriately and meaningfully.

This could be how to best invest in SaaS (software as a service) for some core applications, understanding how IT can be simplified through simple investments that deliver long term benefits, or making the right choices to use cloud solutions to increase reliance, flexibility and cyber security.

The ‘cloud’ is a complex mix of services and solutions – some will be right for your business, some will not. If the decisions are left to the technical and IT teams alone, can you be confident that they are the right ones for your business? Likewise, if you are making choices without understanding the future technical commitments, and relying on your own or third-party advice who’s vested interest is naturally their own solution and success, you might not be investing wisely in your own organisations success.

Where Do You Start?

The best place to start is understanding your business objectives – what are the things you are trying to achieve?

• More flexible working
• Increased security and resilience
• New systems and processes to drive growth
• Reducing costs
• Better access to data for analytics
• Increased collaboration
• Simplification, and reducing complexity

You will already have made some investment in cloud services, either through SaaS or hosting server or services. How these investments and changes work with your next investments is critical. It’s very easy to duplicate costs and be trapped into services you no longer need – so having a clear roadmap is essential.

Simplification – It’s All About Delivery

Cloud services are simpler. This is because there is less to do. Less to manage. That’s got to be good, right? But the challenge is not getting there – a cloud service is very easy to get going – the challenge is closing off the legacy systems it’s replacing.

What you don’t want is two systems and paying and committed to both. It is essential that moving to the cloud is done with consideration, careful planning and great delivery. Having oversight on delivery and execution of the roadmap is critical.

Having advisory IT leadership on the board helps keep the focus on delivery at a senior level and enables the technical teams to have ownership and accountability to succeed with the support and understanding from the business leaders.

Your Commitment to Independent Advisory Digital and Technology Leadership

Having independent advice on digital and technology at senior level doesn’t need to be a big commitment, but it can be one of the best investments of time and resources an organisation can make.

• Support and coach the senior business leadership team through technology decision making
• For a short period of time during change (e.g. large technology investment, or M&A activity)
• Develop a strategy and roadmap with the business and technical teams
• Coaching and mentoring the technical leadership
• Independent, open and honest advice with only the business success as the focus