Cloud Services and the Definition of a Target Operating Model: Organisation

Besides of the incontrovertible possible advantages of Cloud Computing for the business, the internal IT team will be ask some relevant questions concerning the impact a cloud decision:

• Can the cloud provide the resources faster than when hosted locally in your company?
• What do we give up?
• What do we gain?
• Is your organization willing to compromise?
• Are the organization, employees, IT staff, other interested parties willing to make the change without delay?

In general, the following shifts on organizational capabilities needs to be considered while entering the Cloud Computing arena: 

• Governance culture and style: With Cloud Computing, the added values of an IT Organization depends on the performance of a legal entity outside of the perimeters of the own company. Respective Governance structures needs to be in place.
• Risk Management: Cloud Computing is touching on sensitive areas: access to data, intellectual property protection, privacy. Competencies in the areas of Architecture, Security and Compliance are becoming
• Shift of focus from operational to managerial competencies: shift away from Service Operations to Transition, Design and Strategy

Relationship Management to internal and external stakeholders: The retained IT will be in a “sandwich” position (“service broker”) between internal customers and external providers (Cloud Provider). This requires a certain maturity in managing external supplier (performance monitoring, steering, capacity data validation, accounting, conflict management

Process Expertise in two dimensions: Sourcing process expertise (how to manage the entire sourcing lifecycle) and service management process expertise.

Learning and Development: New or changed requirements toward organizational capabilities needs to be supported by training and coaching based on individual development plans.

Are those capabilities around yet and where are the gaps to be addressed before the organization is ready to make the step?  A maturity assessment (or a dedicated Cloud Readiness assessment) helps to identify the gaps in order to implement the respective measures. Best practice tools and methods are in available performing such an analysis – in one of my next blogs I will talk about such tools and methods.

A lot of internal IT teams went through the Cloud Sourcing lifecycle already – most of them unprepared. They had to learn the lessons regarding required organizational capabilities the hard way – meaning, implementing the needed measures in an operational environment. It does not have to be this way if IT managers are clear about the impact of Cloud Computing to their teams way before Cloud Service commencement is starting.

Related Blog-Posts:

• Part I: Target Operation Model – Technology
• Part II: Target Operation Model – Governance
• Part III: Target Operation Model – Services
• Part IV: Target Operation Model – Processes
• Part V: Target Operation Model – Organization
• Part VI: Target Operation Model – People