How to remain committed to your digital revolution, even when the going gets tough

In pretty much any circumstances, the concept of digital transformation can feel overwhelming, but particularly in a large and complex enterprise organisation. And the problem goes deeper than just the technology itself.

Many organisations have already started moving workloads to the cloud, often as part of a multi-year, multi-million-pound transformation process. But the downside to this approach is the efficiency gains, unification, and cost savings are often realised much later in the process. All the while you're running multiple platforms, SaaS tools, and operating models.

Despite a world of unprecedented turbulence customer and employee expectations have never been higher. And businesses need to respond quickly to stay ahead, remain relevant and competitive. The multi-year, huge budget transformation programmes do not lend themselves well to this overriding sense of “here and now” urgency.

In fact, more and more enterprise tech leaders are now telling us they don't want transformation right now, they just need to get onto the cloud.

But this is a quandary because most tech leaders also recognise that digital transformation is really the only logical way forward. The online age means that transparency is higher than ever before. Products and services quickly commoditise, as consumers have everything they need - within a few clicks - to make a buying decision. Your customers demand personalised and convenient interactions. In fact, more than that, they want to choose the experiences that you offer.

I just need to get onto the cloud.

It can be very tempting to park seemingly complex transformation initiatives when the purse strings are being tightened, or the mood in the boardroom is a little more cautious than you've previously enjoyed.

However, this is a position that we at Acceleraate would strongly challenge, and in fact caution. Pausing your digital transformation programme risks your competition and your customers moving ahead faster than you. By the time your pause period is over, you'll likely be well behind the curve. And it's often the areas you can't measure with simple metrics that have the biggest negative long-term impact.

To understand more about why the approach of short-term gain often causes long-term pain, let's turn to Amazon Web Services' Cloud Economics.

AWS has found that the value of cloud extends beyond basic TCO reduction. Customers also see significant improvements in other areas - some of which are more difficult to measure:

1. Cost Savings - infrastructure savings/cost avoidance by moving to the cloud

2. Operational Resilience - improved availability, security & compliance

3. Staff Productivity - efficiency improvement by function on a task-by-task basis

4. Business Agility - deploying new features/applications faster & reducing errors

The statement, “I just need to get onto the cloud”, is usually a response to either point 1 or 2. It's a short-term view, and probably a reaction to external factors such as repeated application downtime, or budget cuts.

But in our experience “lift and shift” is often the wrong approach and, more than that, the wrong reason to get onto the cloud. As nine times out of ten you'll end up with similar problems, just in a more efficient container.

Where cloud can really benefit enterprise businesses is points 3 and 4. These are often harder to measure, especially in the short term, but the longer-term impact of staff productivity and business agility are exponentially more valuable to the future of your business and will help to ensure you keep pace with your competitors, and with your customers.

It's easy to get carried away with transformation, though.

Digital transformation is about staying relevant. Given what's been thrown at us in the last three years, who knows where we'll be by 2025? The world has changed, our attitudes have changed, people have changed, and budgets have changed. And this isn't going away anytime soon - the world will continue to change at pace. And that's why it no longer makes any logical sense to plan your digital transformation and migration activities, so far ahead.

When the going gets tough the optimal approach is to focus your transformation efforts on solving specific, painful problems. Zoom in on what moves the needle and move it quickly. It sounds blindingly obvious, but it's amazing how many times the core and fundamental reasons for a transformation programme get lost in project and budget noise. And the benefits that your business case hinges on are either never delivered, or just delivered too late.

It's no wonder the board is getting nervous!

Your transformation programme needs to deliver value quickly, it needs to focus on resolving your most significant pain points. And there are several compelling reasons why the perfect time is now to shift your focus from long-term programmes to delivering tactical transformation projects.

Expedited Efficiency Savings

Whether your budgets are being squeezed or not, efficiency just makes good sense. By focusing on how technology can solve (or minimise) your biggest pain points right now, you can accelerate the realisation of efficiency savings, without committing to long-term, long-tail transformation programmes.

SaaS Consolidation

The pandemic led many organisations to panic buy solutions, with many now running a plethora of cloud and SaaS tools, often alongside on-prem systems. Integration, data quality and management suddenly got a whole lot harder again; effectively undoing (at least temporarily) any prior digital transformation efforts. During those first few months of 2020, virtual sticking plasters were applied to infrastructure and processes, and your teams didn't have the luxury of sufficient time to review performance, or to learn, iterate and refine. Simply keeping the lights on was the most important thing. Take a long hard look at your current tech stack and ask yourself - do we really need all these services? It's probably time to rationalise.

Customer Acquisition & Retention

Customer expectations have changed beyond all recognition in recent years - and the fact is that this has mostly been driven by cloud technology. Quite simply, customers will buy from companies that are easy to deal with and will serve them in a way that they are comfortable with.

The new normal?

If the last three years have taught us anything, it's how quickly digital transformation can happen when it's not optional. There is little doubt businesses that had already invested in digital transformation were simply better equipped to handle the impact of the pandemic. But maintaining a culture of fast progress and agility becomes ever more challenging as our new normal continues to bed-in. Inertia, doubt, and cynicism return to the fore, exacerbated by less favourable economic conditions, greater customer demands, and higher employee expectations.

Tougher conditions are not a good reason to pause transformation. In fact, quite the opposite. Customer expectations and competitor capabilities will not wait for you. So don't just get onto the cloud. Keep moving the needle.

At Acceleraate we focus on turning pain into progress, quickly. We help our clients to identify and understand their major pain points, and we deliver technical solutions which realise the benefits of cloud-native and serverless technologies in the shortest possible timescale. So, if like many organisations, your longer-term transformation ambitions are on hold, or in doubt, you need to switch your focus to the quicker and shorter wins that will realise value earlier and re-prove your business case for longer term change.