How a Center of Excellence (COE) team drives hybrid cloud transformation and adoption

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Written by: Drew McMillen and Banu Sundhar

In today’s ever-changing technology space, IBM must be hyper-focused on driving the value of the hybrid cloud to its customers for the long term while innovating and adapting to changing conditions. In working towards this, the first step is to adopt the hybrid cloud for IBM’s own use. For this reason, IBM’s CIO organization established a Center of Excellence (COE) team to act as a bridge between the CIO Hybrid Cloud platform and application teams. The goal of the COE is to improve the reach of critical expertise throughout the company, to enable wide-scale adoption of CIO Hybrid Cloud, and provide thought leadership and direction for the various application teams who are at different stages in their hybrid cloud journey.

The COE within CIO Hybrid Cloud is a team of dedicated people with various roles. This article will show you how the IBM CIO organization has organized its Hybrid Cloud COE, how the team functions, how the application teams can leverage the COE today, and how the COE will evolve in the future.

Hybrid Cloud COE

Mission

The COE’s mission is to “accelerate IBM’s hybrid cloud transformation.” The following four pillars of COE strategy guide our progress in delivering on that mission:

1. Data: Data is essential for providing insights about the hybrid cloud transformation. We believe that we can’t improve if we can’t measure.
2. Content: We are enablers for the hybrid cloud transformation. It’s a learning journey for everyone. Content is the vehicle for delivering our expertise and driving cloud upskilling throughout the organization.
3. Relationships: Collaboration, knowledge sharing, code sharing, training, facilitating a community of practice, and most importantly, acting as change agents are crucial to accelerating the hybrid cloud transformation. We maintain relationships across the company to achieve this.
4. Cloud maturity: We establish gates and guardrails, policies and governance, tools and techniques, and best practices to ensure secure, scalable, and stable platforms.

Function

The COE helps to connect several business functions and enable them to achieve hybrid cloud transformation in a scalable way. We are not hybrid cloud platform owners nor application owners. We are “owners of expertise” for the hybrid cloud transformation. We like to think of ourselves as the collaborative glue of the organization. We are facilitators, collaborators, creators, problem solvers, and brokers for the following teams and requirements:

• Application teams and developers who are building and running the applications that IBM depends on.
• Platform teams who are designing, building, and operating the platforms that run those applications.
• Governance, regulatory, and security requirements that are necessary to ensure IBM’s continuity. We ensure that application teams consider these dimensions when building, deploying, and running their applications.
• Customer zero, providing real-world feedback to our internal engineering teams to develop high-quality products, and to tell a compelling story about how we are utilizing IBM and Red Hat technology to run our business.

Roles

We have four role categories on our team, though everyone on the team contributes broadly to the efforts needed to deliver on our mission. This is not an exhaustive list of responsibilities, but a brief summary for each role. We have the following roles on the team:

• Data Engineers collect and analyze data around our application portfolio and cloud maturity to create understanding and generate actionable insights, particularly the increased business and financial value of migrating to hybrid cloud platforms.
• Our Learning Architect drives hybrid cloud learning and upskilling in our application teams by implementing new learning paradigms and ensuring a consistent voice in the content and resources we are creating.
• Delivery Managers promote COE resources to stakeholders, track and drive cloud adoption, and build relationships with application teams and other stakeholders as needed to drive adoption of our hybrid cloud platforms.
• Cloud Architects are our trusted advisors and consultants. They generate cutting-edge hybrid cloud migration and modernization models, which are curated, opinionated resources for cloud adoption best practices. They are also responsible for staying up-to-date on new capabilities coming in from product engineering and figuring out the best way to apply those to achieve our mission.

How we drive adoption

Gamifying application modernization

Gamification is known for driving engagement and even some friendly competition, and we are adopting it to encourage our internal applications to migrate and modernize.

We designed a scoring model to capture the attention and interest of the application teams we work with. Our scoring model is comprised of the following two scales:

1. Platform modernity: Assigns points based on the platform the application team is deploying to, with our OpenShift-based container platform being the most modern and at the top end of the scale.
2. Application modernity: Assigns points based on the number of operational or architectural capabilities that the application team incorporates as part of their migration. We also include scoring for applications that have already migrated and modernized in place. Our initial application modernity dimensions include deploying in multiple regions, ensuring all golden signals and service mapping are in place, increasing the number of microservices, use of AI services, IBM Cloud services, and IBM Cloud Paks, and converting from legacy middlewares.

We set score targets for each functional area using historical migration data and a few assumptions about modernization opportunities, with a hefty 50% increase to encourage teams to stretch into more modern platforms and application architectures.

While this scoring model, in its initial iteration, is not inclusive of all relevant cloud modernity dimensions, what matters is that we can measure the ones we have defined here today. As our data capabilities mature, we will increase the number of dimensions automatically scored and expand our scoring model accordingly. The data we are collecting is also used to measure the overall cloud maturity of our application portfolio and track improvements in cloud maturity over time.

CIO Hybrid Cloud and AI — better together

As we look to the future, we are working with some of IBM’s latest AI-backed tools, such as Transformation Advisor, CodeNet, and Mono2Micro, to help our application teams modernize more efficiently than ever. We are also looking for opportunities to directly integrate these tools into our platform onboarding workflow to provide a seamless AI-augmented onboarding experience.

COE today and tomorrow

While today the COE is front and center, working directly with application teams, that model will change in the near future. As the platform offerings continue to mature, COE expertise will become more integrated with the overall platform onboarding experience, guiding application teams to greater levels of cloud maturity in a more seamless and scalable way. The COE will be in the background updating for the latest in hybrid cloud technologies, but with less direct, hands-on interactions with the application teams that exist today.

In conclusion, the COE team is chartered to scale migration and transformation of internal business applications across the company. We engage with application teams to provide expertise and guidance for the migration of applications into the hybrid cloud. We act as a conduit between the hybrid cloud platform teams and application teams. We bring hybrid cloud platform knowledge closer to the application teams and take feedback to the platform teams to improve their offerings. We document our application teams’ journeys as case studies and develop models to scale the migration efforts across the company. The result: a dramatic increase in consumption of hybrid cloud platforms in a scalable, secure way that will serve as an exemplary showcase for IBM’s customers.

Drew McMillen leads the CIO Hybrid Cloud Center of Excellence at IBM. Banu Sundhar is Principal Learning Architect, Cloud Enablement on the COE team. Both are based in RTP, North Carolina. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.