Posted by
martin237 on Jun 23, 2017 in
Cloud |
0 comments
I was speaking with a consultant friend of mine about transformation and he was asking about the determinants of success, this was following on from a conversation that I had in which you might deliver a project but fail to meet your key performance indicators – your determinants for success. It stems from the following transformation means many things to many people, key performance metrics can mean many things to different stakeholders and indeed success can be internalised within a business line but not the wider group. Transformation could be me migrating an application from a legacy data warehouse platform on an unsupported version of Solaris to a new Big Data solution, but often in such scenarios the financial savings are not direct in nature, we take out a suite of legacy costs (which should not be discounted) and introduce a different range of services or cost resulting from the replacement Big Data solution. Therefore defining what your key performance metrics are and what those mean is crucial. In the example above to HR, I might have reduced their spend on Solaris by $40,000 a year in IT charges, to the Solaris team, I might have enabled a physical server and some associated costs to be cancelled, but to group IT, the costs might be neutral. The level of cost transparency you have not only in the re-charge but the direct PnL charges need to be in place so that at the right level you can align projects, and goals with outcomes, a financial SQL query if you like, to achieve this target what do I need to transform or take out. At the same time we need to recognise that decommissioning a platform, application or service should create opportunities for savings as we scale up those changes. If we transform enough legacy platforms, for example we got rid of AIX or Solaris entirely from the estate does that enable the move to Cloud more transparently with the associated opportunities to reduce costs across the stack. Transformation, the move to Digital adoption of DevOps and Agile are all admirable activities where the legacy IT consumers should be headed often the drive is to maximise change for lower direct initial costs but that can have unintended costs either from outages, unplanned behaviour or simply things like the teams not being...