Growens building a Cloud CoE
The CCOE at theoretical level
The starting point
Cloud management, at a highly optimized level is a complex goal to achieve for a company that, like Growens, comes from the old on-premise management.
Often, the lack of knowledge forces employees to take advanced courses of extra training or induces the company to pay external consultants to avoid wasting money due to an improper management of the infrastructure.
Another problem encountered is the speed of action: in many cases only a few internal people have the appropriate know-how to manage AWS services, this causes a very vertical and rigid decision-making process; the company acquires internal notions and standardizes them, creating procedures that force the passage “to the top” every time the need to start a cloud project arises.
In addition to slowing down procedures then, people engaged in other types of tasks have to use time to follow this type of vertical procedure.
Specifically, for Growens, the main problem remains the presence of gaps in certain departments, where they struggle to manage the cloud in an optimized way, generating difficulties in coordinating cross-company projects.
In the company, cloud administration is centralized, but to avoid slowdowns, projects are left independently in the hands of BUs.
The Project
To seize these opportunities for improvement, it is possible to activate a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) a cross-functional competence center, in order to design or revise the processes related to the Cloud.
A specialized team that can provide strategic and analytical support to the organization. The center of excellence should be composed of a mixed group that is flexible depending on the situation, and a holding company component to supervise and support activities, leaving autonomy to the BU’s with the intent, however, to increase synergy and sharing of best practices.
With the creation of this center, the company would have the right conduit between the Holding and the BUs, where a cross-functional team would be able to share knowledge and useful information greatly increasing productivity and compliance with the company’s cloud policies.
This solution represents the right compromise between the rigidity imposed by the top management governance, which allows an excellent level of optimization, and the agility in completing projects, thus avoiding unnecessary loss of time.
The CCoE concept does not originate from within the company at all,
it is a well-known topic in the cloud market, and the main IaaS providers first provide indications on how it could be best implemented.
I report the link to an interesting whitepaper from AWS regarding this topic.
The key points of our CCoE
To work at its best, a CCoE outlines a number of key aspects that are essential to ensure proper operation:
- Standardize and drive the adoption of cloud services within the enterprise.
- Research best practices on how to manage cloud infrastructure.
- Share knowledge as broadly as possible.
- Create shared code repositories and communication channels.
- Offer internal advice and support to cloud users in the enterprise.
In general, two main streams regarding CCoE are distinguished within the enterprise:
- The first called “top-down,” from top to bottom, sees the top-down definition of the guidelines and modus operandi to be followed when using the cloud.
- The second “bottom-up”, from the bottom to the top, wants the bottom-up sharing of knowledge to create shared value among all parts of the company.
Areas for improvement
What Growens aims to achieve by implementing the Cloud Center of Excellence is the transformation of problems encountered into opportunities for improvement and further value generation.
Starting with the standardization of operating rules and the sharing of technical knowledge, the goals in practice are to automate processes in the cloud, visualize active project portfolios and improve the ease and traceability of costs and allocation.
Over time, CCoE aims to create a true internal culture related to cloud usage. In this way, following best-practices will no longer be a directive, but a habit; the hope is that everyone, in the near future, will act in the best way possible without even realizing it.
This vision is very similar to the one that started the Lean Philosophy in Japan, where order and minimal waste were not orders imposed by someone, but everyday, normal actions for workers.
Speaking of people involved and structure, we can say that a CCoE is unique to each company, there will never be a single, precise structure in all its complexity.
However, this doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be some key roles, i.e., those core figures necessary to create a winning team, and that somehow should be chosen regardless of the type of company and the state of the cloud in it.
Credits
This project was made possible thanks to the support of some key figures, the sponsorship received from the IT department of Growens, in particular from Michele Cappellini (CIO), the immense help received from Carlo Tonoli, Junior IT Procurement Specialist Intern and the partner Claranet Italia, in particular Paolo Latella (AWS Hero).
Finally, a special thanks goes to all the colleagues who with their collaborative spirit made the realization of this project possible.
