How public cloud adoption created more business value

In the paper "How to use the adoption of Public Cloud as force Factor to jolt your organization out of old ways of working in order to deliver value to the business fast" customer case studies in collaboration between Microsoft and TeamValue. Coincidentally or not. The three specialties we support clients with. Cloud, Agile and BI. Well, that's no coincidence. We take you through the key factors of transitioning to the cloud to achieving business value in this blog.

Are you looking for more depth after reading this blog? TeamValue - The Golden Path

The points below are previews from Microsoft's paper "How to use the adoption of Public Cloud as force Factor to jolt your organization out of old ways of working in order to deliver value to the business fast. We have placed with each topic a real-world example recognizable to both business and IT.

Transitioning to the public cloud

Brave passionate, committed and servant leaders (IT and Business) are required to initiate this transition and drive the structural changes needed, to gain the value that public cloud can provide to the business. (see https://aka.ms/globalwarning)

The value of public cloud is sometimes summarized as speed, agility, innovation and cost benefits. These benefits are mainly monetized in the business, which can respond more quickly to changing regulations and/or market needs. In order to make sure that "the engine gets replaced/modernized", the business will need to be involved from the very beginning of public cloud adoption. It's the compelling event in the business (respond more quickly to changing regulations and/or market needs) that will help make the adoption of public cloud successful. In the interest of the result to be achieved, the business will also help to drive the implementation of the required (and often painful) changes involving working methods, organization, culture and staffing. (Check this blog about the difference between IT and Business Driven Transformation. A quote from this article: "a company cannot digitally transform from data without business decisions driving the effort. IT alone can't drive this initiative.": Business-Driven Digital Transformation with Azure and Azure DevOps - Developer Support (microsoft.com))

''TeamValue helped us in the transition to the Azure Cloud. With the help of Hendrik and Anton, we managed to implement this way of working and get to the final result: a standardized, scalable and maintainable platform that meets all security and ISO standards.'' - Manager Qualogy Solutions - Steven Sharma > Qualogy & TeamValue

Results

• New functionalities for the SaaS application. 100% automated CI/CD pipeline using One Button Deploy
• Cloud best practices and Microservices with the highest possible scalability, security and availability
• Security Framework implemented within all DevOps teams.

Cloud adoption - Agile way of work

To take on the new responsibilities, Product Teams will have to invest in adopting new skills, competencies, mindset and culture on an individual- and team level (basic to advanced public cloud knowledge and immersive team based adoption of DevOps practices). A standard way of measuring performance of Product Team (which to a certain extent also demonstrates their maturity) are well known Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the IT industry such as: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recover and change failure rate. The environment and approach explained above enables enterprises to move from low/medium performers to high or elite performers. This new way of working not only improves agility but also reliability. High and Elite Performers will be able to provide new product features fast and reliable which can support business to improve customer intimacy, operational excellence as well as product leadership.

"TeamValue combines the change of team and business processes with the change of IT processes. The ideal combination for Allego at that time. Besides the technology, which many companies do have in house, TeamValue also looks at the process and the employees to realize and especially ensure change within the organization."- Mourad Dahmani - Scrum master and cloud architect > Allego & TeamValue

Results

• The performance of DevOps teams is structurally insightful using TeamNow dashboards
• Modern Service Management - The IT Operations department is set up based on Modern Service Management Principles and is driven by Secure Score, Mean Time to Repair and Uptime
• The ISO 27001 certification was achieved within one year as one of the first in the market, based on the Golden Path way of working

The world of BI - from data to insights to business value  

Although public cloud promises innovative services to be available with the click of a button, many enterprises and business units within enterprises continue to experience high delivery lead times for new business initiatives (weeks or even months). This often is a result of slow provisioning of public cloud resources. In these enterprises, various teams are involved in the provisioning request of public cloud resources (e.g. Architecture, Change Management, Network-, Server-, Security teams). These independent teams perform manual or semi-automated fragmented provisioning of cloud resources, with each having their own cycle time. To coordinate these activities, stringent process control is added (checks and approvals) to detect/prevent errors (which in turn can cause loopbacks and delays). As soon as public cloud resources (e.g. network connectivity, monitoring, firewall rules, databases, web server(s)) are provisioned, application teams start building and deploying their application on the provisioned public cloud resources. The whole process can take weeks or longer. The total delivery lead time is the sum of the cycle times (including potential loopbacks, delays etc.) in the critical path of the process explained. These patterns are common in organizations where a more traditional Enterprise IT Operating model is applied.

''We didn't have the systems, processes, people and knowledge. TeamValue has in-house specialists who add immediate value to your organization. Where models used to have to run for 8 hours we now do it in 8 minutes. Even in the transition from the old to the new Data Warehouse, we are able to keep running without downtime. The Data Engineer, Business Analyst and Project Leader are hands-on, future-proof and down to earth. I've never had a collaboration like this before!'' - Director of Data & Analytics - Dr. Lydia de Haan > Air Miles is working together on the growth of data capability and is establishing a Modern Data Warehouse with TeamValue. From customer view to human view.

Results

• A fully integrated BI platform where the mutual data traffic and permissions of management, analysts and the marketing department are directly defined.  
• The platform is API-driven and data is stored in the Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Through a Data Catalog and the deployment of Data Marts, Air Miles can ensure Data Governance, agility, availability and historical data

The ultimate goal? The business in control! Want to know how the above examples addressed both technical and process issues? Paul Fijnvandraat, Senior Principal Consultant at Microsoft, created a paper on how to leverage public cloud adoption to achieve greater business value and mentioned us regularly in it. You get specific examples about our lessons learned and the principles of The Golden Path that in the end lead to full transparency, schedulable work, One Button Deploy and Zero Touch software development. Find more info via How to use public cloud as a forcing device, to jolt your organization out of old ways of working, in order to deliver business value fast | LinkedIn.