Achieve a Balance between IT Capabilities and Business Requirements
First of all, a company needs to understand its IT architecture and technical capabilities, to ensure that the chosen services are compatible with existing applications and can be smoothly integrated. If the company is relatively weak in IT technology, it is recommended to choose a managed service provider to provide technical support and training services. Second, when designing, the company needs to balance IT capabilities with business requirements. The company needs to clarify its business needs and goals, and translate them into implementation requirements for IT architecture.
Make Good Technology Selections
Facing numerous technology/tool selections, organizations should judge and select based on several main aspects, such as long-term technology evolution roadmaps, community activity levels, technology maturity, security, etc. For example, in the process of selecting automation tools and technology solutions, multiple aspects such as configuration management, immutable infrastructure, procedural/declarative languages, cloud provider support levels, community user activity, and technology maturity can be compared.
Align the Team Environment with Technology Selections
Team environment is often an important aspect that is overlooked in the process of implementing new technologies. The learning costs of the team, organizational support level, technology work habits, and the opinions of senior employees on this technology upgrade are all very important. People and technology should be organically combined to make judgments and reflections.
Define Clear Responsibilities
To achieve operational excellence, not only the Dev and Ops teams need to be involved, but also various roles (such as finance, security, etc.) need to play a role in the entire operational process as steps for business knowledge output and crucial node business approvals.
Establish Effective Workflow
Compared with quickly achieving business goals, setting up the basic framework first will get twice the result with half the effort. For example, before implementing IaC, it is beneficial to organize the setting of people, permissions, and processes between infrastructure code management and local repositories, which will make the step-by-step implementation of infrastructure automation code smoother.
Operate the Production Environment Effectively
Automation can help organizations achieve transformation and improve efficiency in many aspects, but the automated management and operation of the production environment is a complex accumulation process that cannot be achieved overnight. Organizations can choose to start with the scenarios that cover the most and can improve efficiency the most, and continuously improve automation to operate the production environment effectively.
Manage Suppliers Effectively
Introducing external suppliers means transferring the value activities executed internally by the organization to an external company. Whether a software system is developed on-premises or introduced from an external supplier depends on whether the additional value generated by implementing this development internally exceeds the cost of managing such development.
Determine Which Suppliers to Introduce
The strategic model of a company is to explore competitive advantages through the redeployment of resources and capabilities. When a company decides to purchase external software, it needs to evaluate the resources and capabilities of the external suppliers. Once the external services to be purchased are determined, the following issues need to be clarified:
Can the services provided by this supplier improve the resources and capabilities of the company?
How close is the relationship between this supplier and the company's competitiveness, strategic resources, and capabilities?
Supplier Structure
The organization should bear full responsibility for cloud governance. The organization should adopt a formal governance method, develop a set of working modes to manage its supplier services, and ensure value provision. Internally, the organization should establish a set of standards and processes, with the main responsibilities including:
Monitoring the execution of supplier agreements and the overall relationship with suppliers.
Providing a reporting mechanism for issues and incidents during cooperation.
Determining the standards for introducing suppliers and the entry threshold.
The first thing the organization should focus on is to clearly define services, that is, specific business requirements. Once resources and organizations begin discussing, they must explain the introduction of new key skills. Although these abilities are dynamic, they can generally be divided into three categories: business, technical, and delivery capabilities.
Supplier Admission Criteria
Before any implementation, the organization should establish a set of admission criteria for cloud services. Without such metrics, it is difficult to evaluate the potential impact of the supplier's implementation. Measurement can take two forms:
Technical Metrics: Cloud First, cost optimization, system stability, security compliance, operational efficiency, etc.
Business Metrics: Business process efficiency, cost savings, service-level agreements, etc.
The organization's assessment of suppliers can establish detailed specifications from four dimensions: cost, stability, security, and performance. For example:
Whether functional components should prioritize the use of cloud services instead of on-premises, because on-premises brings high maintenance costs and poor stability.
Whether functional components have clear monitoring indicators that allow the organization's Ops team to clearly understand the system operation status.
Whether functional components have security vulnerabilities, which may cause security incidents after deployment and affect business operations.
After the functional components are deployed on the cloud, whether the system's load status is observable, allowing a clear understanding of the cost utilization of resources.