Balance IT capabilities with business requirements
First, understand your organization's IT architecture and technical capabilities to ensure new services are compatible with existing applications and integrate smoothly. If your organization has limited IT expertise, consider using a Managed Service Provider for support and training.
Second, when designing your architecture, balance IT capabilities with business requirements. Clearly define your business goals and translate them into requirements for your IT architecture.
Select the right technology
Choose technologies and tools based on key factors like your long-term technology roadmap, community activity, technical maturity, and security. For example, when selecting automation tools and solutions, compare them on aspects like Configuration Management, Immutable Infrastructure, Procedural Language versus Declarative Language, cloud vendor support, community engagement, and technical maturity.
Align technology choices with your team environment
Teams often overlook a critical factor when implementing new technologies: their own environment. Key considerations include the team's learning curve, the level of organizational support, existing work habits, and the perspectives of long-term employees on the technology upgrade. Integrate these human and technological factors for a complete assessment.
Establish clear responsibilities
Operational Excellence requires participation from development, operations, finance, and security teams. These teams contribute business knowledge and approve critical steps in the lifecycle.
Define your workflows
Building a solid foundation before rushing to meet business goals is more effective in the long run. For example, before implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), defining the roles, permissions, and processes for the infrastructure code repository ensures a smoother, more scalable automation rollout.
Manage your production environment effectively
While automation can drive transformation and efficiency, managing a production environment with automation is a complex, incremental process, not a one-off effort. Start with scenarios that cover the most common use cases and offer the greatest efficiency gains, then iteratively refine your automation.
Manage your suppliers
Engaging a supplier means transferring a value-generating activity from your organization to an external company. Build software in-house only if the value of doing so outweighs the cost of managing its development.
Determine which suppliers to engage
Your strategy involves redeploying resources and capabilities to build a competitive advantage. When purchasing external software, evaluate the supplier's resources and capabilities. Once you identify which external services to procure, clarify the following:
Will this supplier's service enhance your organization's resources and capabilities?
How closely does this supplier align with your organization's strategic resources and competitive advantage?
Supplier governance
Your organization is ultimately responsible for Cloud Governance. Adopt a formal governance approach by establishing an operating model to manage supplier services and ensure value delivery. Create an internal group to establish standards and processes, with key responsibilities that include:
Monitor adherence to supplier agreements and manage the overall supplier relationship.
Provide a formal mechanism to escalate issues and incidents that arise during the partnership.
Define supplier onboarding standards and entry criteria.
Your first priority is to clearly define the services and their corresponding business needs. When discussing resources and organization, acquire new, critical skills. While these capabilities are dynamic, they generally fall into three categories: business, technical, and delivery.
Define supplier onboarding standards
Before any implementation, you should establish a set of cloud onboarding standards. Without these metrics, you cannot accurately assess the impact of a supplier's implementation. Metrics fall into two categories:
Technical metrics: Cloud-first, Cost Optimization, System Stability, Security Compliance, Operational Efficiency.
Business metrics: Business Process Efficiency, Cost Savings, Service Level.
When assessing a supplier, you should establish detailed technical specifications based on four dimensions: cost, stability, security, and performance. For example:
Do functional components prioritize the use of cloud products over self-built solutions? Self-built systems often incur high maintenance costs and have lower stability.
Do functional components have clear monitoring metrics so your operations team can understand system health?
Are there any security vulnerabilities that could cause security incidents after going live?
After cloud deployment, can you observe system load, resource utilization, and cost?