Strategy and the Cloud — Think Strategic
Over the past couple of months, I’ve had several unexpected conversations about moving data to the cloud. These have been unexpected because they have involved organizations that are small with an even smaller data footprint. From a little community church to an antique shop to a guy selling quilt patterns online — they’ve all reached out to me regarding their (short) journey to the cloud. Why does this matter? Because even non-technical organizations with small data footprints are seeing the tactical advantages of moving their data warehouse to the cloud for reporting and analytics. Storage is exponentially cheaper, the cost to compute can be better optimized, disaster recovery is cheaper, maintenance costs are eliminated, spreadsheets can become a thing of the past, and the list goes on.
To end the conversation with the tactical advantages of cloud data storage for business intelligence and analytics would be an end of year review win for the leader of an IT department, but it would miss the far more important and valuable strategic perspective that IT leaders should take when migrating data warehouses to the cloud. Selling the business on cost reductions and lower IT headcount might work initially, but a proper cloud deployment may actually increase expenses over time as the business is able to drive more value out of their data. It may also require an increase in headcount to help meet business demand — especially if no strategy exists beforehand.
This is why any company that is considering a move to the cloud for their data warehousing needs should be thinking beyond current fiscal year tactical benefits and towards how the cloud as a tool is going to strategically change the way the company leverages data to answer business questions.
Engage the Business Early and Often
To be strategic, one of the first steps that an IT department needs to take when migrating the data warehouse(s) to the cloud is to understand what the business wants and needs. The challenge with asking the business for what they want and what they need is that an IT organization can get an impossibly wide variety of responses. One vice president (the skeptic) may challenge you to build a P&L statement for their business unit without it taking four analysts two weeks and ten spreadsheets.
The next vice president (the naysayer) may decide there is nothing wrong with using four analysts for two weeks and advise that his department does not need IT at all while another vice president (the technology cheerleader) wants to embrace every technology available to run a stochastic budget using streaming data and machine learning that adjusts the budget to take advantage of market trends throughout the reporting period.
These responses are common and are easy places to get stuck and distracted because one leader has no buy-in while another leader may be asking for something that probably doesn’t even make logical business sense. The real value in engaging the business is to determine where buy-in exists, who are the skeptics that need to be turned into advocates, who are the naysayers that will move forward only when forced to do so, and who are the cheerleaders that will champion the cause.
I have advised teams to actually create a physical map of the leaders and influencers within an organization, what their current opinion of a cloud migration project is, where their opinion needs to be, and when they were last engaged. These maps often look like a bulletin board from a crime series on TV with pictures of individuals, yarn connecting influencers with leaders, chains of command, etc.
Take the three vice presidents from above. Identifying the skeptic, the naysayer, and the cheerleader can then help you in future engagements. As you begin to craft a coherent data strategy and roadmap, using some type of visual model of the organization can help you focus on converting the skeptic, level-set expectations with the cheerleader that wants to jump immediately into predictive analytics, and leverage key influencers within the organization to change the naysayer’s viewpoint.
Engaging the business often can not only build buy-in, but it also helps an IT organization build out their understanding of where the business is with reporting and analytics, where they want to be, and where they need to be. This should be used to drive your strategic roadmap for your cloud migration and help prioritize the order of data to migrate or build out. In turn, your strategic roadmap will help you gain additional alignment across the broader organization.
Don’t hesitate to bring in an outside team, like Hashmap, that has this as a core competency. They can help not only stand up the warehouse (which is deceptively easy), but they can help you configure it in ways to anticipate the future while keeping costs low.
Segregate the Known and the Unknown
Building out a roadmap for data, reporting, and analytics can be overwhelming. Not only is there an impossible list of deliverables from the business, but it is difficult to check a newsfeed today without hearing how uncertain and volatile the world is. Stack the fast-evolving world of technology on top of this and it is easy to get overwhelmed trying to meet the needs of the business today and anticipate the needs of the business tomorrow.
Don’t do this.
For one, basic Managerial Accounting reports have been largely unchanged for decades. Every industry has a set of basic metrics that are important to know. Profit and loss statements at the business unit level, cost of goods sold, inventory counts, cycle times, and expense reports are all basic reporting requirements that any business unit is going to want to build into a dashboard or report. More importantly, if an IT organization can position this data for reporting, they will probably have covered 80% of the questions that an organization is going to need.
Quick Tip: Not sure what basic reporting your organization has? Check out your company’s SEC filings: the 10Qs and the 10Ks. The tables and terminology can serve as a compass. If you are a privately held company, find a publicly-traded company in your industry and check their filings.
You will always get the high-flying and forward-thinking director or vice president that wants to dive way past these metrics. No problem, but you have to crawl before you can walk and you have to walk before you can run. Creating a strategic roadmap that phases in data and analytics can bring most business leaders on board without overwhelming and confusing them. It also helps drive alignment between the cheerleader and the skeptic.
Second, embrace the unknown. Even if our world was boring and highly stable, empowering the business with data is going to push your organization into new territory or territories. For every question answered through data and analytics, 10 more questions wil be asked. If you build a strategy that embraces the unknown, success can follow.
In future articles, we’ll discuss how the nature of cloud storage can help you embrace the unknown. For now, it is important to encourage your team to build out a core set of data that is going to be used often for a wide range of reasons while leaving the door open for additional data to be leveraged.
Key Takeaways
Remember that business leaders are generally not technologists. They must be educated and mentored. You need to use your team to find out what their data pain points are. You also need to remember that they don’t know what they don’t know. This is obvious in theory, but difficult in practice. A report covering last quarter’s performance that takes 30 minutes to run on a SQL Server database can take 3 seconds in the cloud. If a business leader doesn’t understand this, it makes it hard for them to imagine how they could use 24 months of data to understand seasonality, cyclical trends, or secular trends. Be sure to be patient, meet the business where they are today, and slowly unveil the world that is possible.
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Scottie Bryan is a Delivery Manager with Hashmap, an NTT Data Company, providing Data, Cloud, IoT, and AI/ML solutions and consulting expertise across industries with a group of innovative technologists and domain experts accelerating high-value business outcomes for our customers. Connect with Scottie on LinkedIn.
