The need for a Cloud Center of Excellence in digital transformation

Digital transformation initiatives often struggle to achieve their intended goals, with McKinsey and Company reporting that up to 70 percent fail to fully meet objectives. Challenges like time delays, cost overruns, and incomplete functionality can undermine the success of these efforts.

This post is the first in a four-part series that addresses how a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) can be a viable solution to address these common pitfalls.

Part one focuses on what a CCoE is and how it, combined with the Amazon Web Services Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF), can help your enterprise with its digital transformation. Part two focuses on the three nontechnical perspectives of the AWS CAF. Part three addresses the three technical perspectives of the AWS CAF. And part four explains a framework for defining organizational areas of responsibility.

Cloud journey map

One tool that can help organizations with their cloud adoption is a cloud journey map. The cloud journey map provides a structured way for organizations to plan, execute, and measure their cloud transformation initiatives on AWS. It helps identify dependencies, risks, and the required resources to ensure a smooth and successful cloud migration.

Figure 1. Example cloud journey map.

Key value proposition of a CCoE

A CCoE is the organizational body that brings together people, processes, and technology to guide an organization through its cloud adoption journey. It serves as a central hub to drive cloud adoption, establish best practices, and enable better governance and business outcomes. A CCoE offers several key benefits:

• Defining and disseminating cloud architecture and operational best practices
• Improving governance, program management, and cost optimization
• Enabling quicker deployment cycles and higher-quality cloud workloads
• Driving better business outcomes and increased cross-functional collaboration

Establishing your CCoE upon an established framework can be valuable and time saving because it provides a structured approach and proven methodology for guiding cloud adoption. Our recommendations are based upon using the AWS CAF. This framework, based on Michael Porter’s value chain model, helps organizations assess their cloud maturity and identify the capabilities they need to focus on.

The AWS CAF comprises three key elements:

• Business outcomes – The framework starts with understanding the organization’s high-level business objectives, such as revenue growth or improved customer experience.
• Transformation domains – To achieve these business outcomes, the organization must focus on four key transformation domains: technology, process, organization, and product.
• Capabilities – Underpinning these transformation domains are various capabilities related to business, people, governance, platforms, security, and operations.

The following diagram shows the cloud transformation journey as it follows the AWS CAF.

Figure 2. Cloud transformation journey that follows the AWS CAF.

By aligning cloud initiatives with business outcomes and systematically developing the necessary capabilities across these transformation domains, the organization can drive successful cloud adoption and digital transformation.

In addition to understanding the AWS CAF, it’s also important to be familiar with the stages of cloud adoption:

1. Project – Initial cloud workloads are deployed, and the organization begins to validate the value of the cloud.
2. Foundation – The organization builds fundamental cloud capabilities, such as establishing accounts, policies, and a service catalog.
3. Migration – Existing on-premises workloads are migrated to the cloud.
4. Modernization – The organization modernizes its applications and infrastructure to use cloud-centered services and capabilities.
5. Continuous reinvention – The organization continuously optimizes and evolves its cloud environment to drive innovation and business value.

These stages are shown in the following graph.

Figure 3. Stages of cloud adoption.

Knowing where an organization is in its cloud adoption journey is crucial for the CCoE to tailor its strategies and initiatives accordingly.

Conclusion

Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence is a critical step for organizations looking to drive successful digital transformation initiatives. By focusing on the people, process, and technology aspects of cloud adoption, the CCoE can help address common challenges, improve governance, and enable the organization to realize the full benefits of the cloud.