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Ten reasons for setting up a Cloud Center of Excellence (part 1)

Why would you need a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)?  Let’s give 10 good reasons.  Part 1 …

Increased Business Value

The whole idea behind a cloud first strategy is to offer more value to the business.  But that doesn’t come by itself.  It’s not because you adopt a “cloud first” strategy that miracles are going to happen.  Cloud technology offers possibilities for innovation that didn’t exist before.  Or not at the same cost or at the same speed of execution.  The challenge is that if you look at your current IT operating model, it might not be “fit for purpose”.  If your business colleagues would start throwing 10 new initiatives to you every week, how would you deal with that?  The increased business value starts with a smooth working Cloud Operating model.  Onboarding of new potential cloud initiatives needs to be streamlined.  Think of setting up Cloud Onboarding Boards (or pick yourself a name for it).  With a clear governance behind it.  This is what we help you setup in our Governance pillar of our 45 Degrees approach to a CCoE.

Faster adoption, migration, and innovation

To drive faster cloud adoption, you need to do your homework in the form of platform pre-work.  It would be very inefficient to have each cloud workstream take their own architectural decisions.  It would simply end up in chaos and … a very high cloud consumption cost.  You need to start working on reference architectures, service catalog and standard provisioning of cloud services.  That will allow you to be efficient when discussing and evaluating a new potential cloud workload.

Quicker Deployment Cycles

The holy grail of cloud computing.  Continuous deployment, continuous integration.  Or the other way round, it doesn’t matter.  But it doesn’t come by itself.  How do you handle this automation part?  How do you make sure your developers can deploy their own code in an efficient way?  This requires some technical preparation work, some architectural decisions and most likely a fair share of readiness activities.

Efficient collaboration between “teams”

Putting everybody in a self organising team and work in an agile way … Sounds great.  But it does require some solid preparation work.  When you get everything you need in place, these teams will be more efficient.  How do you get there? We have a programmatic approach to get your there with an assessment, workshop, coaching and more, delivered by our colleagues of iLean.

Improved Governance and Program Management

One of the questions we often get is: “What is a CCoE?”  The short answer is it’s a program to drive the cloud onboarding of production workloads.  The CCoE is not going to do “cloud migrations” or is not going to execute a cloud project.  The CCoE in our view is not a team of 50 people or more.  It’s a small, agile team with a handful of people running the program on top of all of the cloud projects.  On top of, or surrounding, supporting, …  By having a CCoE, you can streamline the governance of all those cloud projects.  One of the important capacilities in a CCoE is to design a project and program management approach for cloud projects that suit your needs.

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