5 things to avoid when driving your hybrid cloud strategy
As an IT leader who is taking your team on a hybrid cloud journey, regardless of who you partner with for services or technology, you need to have your head in the game. You’re going to be faced with new challenges and new decisions. You’ll be told that you need to get your hybrid cloud implementation done faster, so your boss can show the big boss that there’s value in hybrid cloud and you’re helping “transform” the business.
But you’ve heard all that before. Why is this any different from other IT platform changes that we’ve been through? Simply put, IT as we knew it and that we grew up with is dead.
Technology has pivoted from being an operational function to get processes done faster to a strategic differentiator, where companies like yours use it to develop new products and services, and run a different business. You can’t do this if you’re operating IT like we did a decade (or more) ago.
My team and I would like to share some of what we’ve learned on our hybrid cloud implementation so far. Call this your intro to drive your hybrid cloud; your “how-to”. Why driving? To put your company at a business and technological advantage, you need to be in the driver’s seat and do it right. If you don’t do it this way, you can pretty much call it game over for your company.
To start, if you really want to move fast and generate value for your organization, and ultimately have IT teams focus on innovation for the business, avoid doing these 5 things:
1. Just doing it without caring why
Agile has taught us to get moving as quickly as possible. But doing it “just because” or because “everyone else is doing it” won’t get you where you need to be. Instead, take a few minutes to consider the specific value that you’re looking to target with your hybrid cloud. For us, it’s about getting speed, scale, and security simultaneously — something we can’t get with either private cloud or public cloud alone.
2. Boiling the ocean
I like to say that you can boil the ocean, but only if you move the planet closer to the sun. It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult and takes more energy than you could reasonably find. The message: start small, targeted, and focused. This allows you to experiment, prove some initial value, and build from there. We focused first on applications that were already containerized so we could get traction quickly.
3. Buying it
Think you can just buy some fancy new tech, install it, and away you go? Think again. Even with software solutions that will get you most of the way there, plan to spend a lot of time focused on how you’ll integrate with your IT operating environment — from your change management, to monitoring, to security practices. This is where the bulk of the work is. In our case, ensuring that there was integration to our CMDB, applying CI/CD pipelines, and implementing our security protocols were a few areas we spent a lot of time on, beyond the core hybrid cloud container platform itself.
4. Measuring the crap out of everything
Look, your boss will be wanting you to show “value”. Your consulting partner may want to use this as an opportunity to stand up a KPI practice for the things you aren’t tracking. Don’t run the risk of delaying progress to measure the things that don’t matter. Measure what you can, with a keen eye to what you’ll need to measure next as your progress accelerates. It will change over time. In our case, we started with measuring applications, moved to measuring the financial value, and then moved to the business value, all in ways that showed our organization how important it was to invest. In the beginning, we didn’t have a good way to measure the financial value, which we knew was important. But for us, it was key to get things rolling. Later, we looked back and saw that in ten months we had moved over 680 applications to our hybrid cloud platform.
5. Running this like a non-stop, top-down project
Large strategic initiatives can be taxing to teams. And while you’re getting the actual platforms and applications running in new and different ways, one of the key things you can do is take time to celebrate. I’m not talking simple types of recognition for doing the work. It’s critically important to look for types of recognition and celebration that reinforce the new behaviors you need. Some ways that we did this on our team: a competition for a code-name for our hybrid cloud platform, t-shirts with our new logo on it, and public recognition for new ways of working.
Over the course of the coming weeks, we’ll take a deep dive into each of these areas and even get into some of the technical details of how we approached it. Our goal is to share our experiences, so you’ll learn something you didn’t already know that will help you accelerate your own journey, and drive a hybrid cloud. I hope you’ll join us.
Matt Lyteson is Vice President of CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM based in RTP, North Carolina. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
