Governance perspective
The governance perspective focuses on orchestrating cloud initiatives while maximizing organizational benefits and minimizing transformation-related risks. It comprises seven capabilities. Common stakeholders include chief transformation officer, CIO, CTO, CFO, CDO, and CRO.
1. Program and project management
Deliver interdependent cloud initiatives in a flexible and coordinated manner.
Complex, cross-functional cloud transformation initiatives require careful coordination, especially in more traditionally structured organizations. Program management is critical because many of these interdependencies only become obvious during delivery. Manage interdependencies by aligning multiple initiatives for optimized or integrated costs, schedule, effort, and benefits. Regularly validate roadmap with business sponsors and escalate any issues to the senior leadership in a timely fashion to drive accountability and transparency. Adopt an agile approach to minimize the need to make far-reaching predictions, so you can learn from experience and adapt as progress through transformation journey. To help respond to change, produce well-prioritized backlogs and structure work in the form of epics and stories.
2. Benefits management
Ensure that the business benefits associated with cloud investments are realized and sustained.
The success of transformation is determined by the resulting business benefits. Clear identification of the desired benefits upfront will allow to prioritize cloud investments and track transformation progress over time. Identify metrics, quantify desired benefits, and communicate to the relevant stakeholders. Align the timing and lifespan of benefits with strategic goals. Incorporate benefits delivery into a benefits realization roadmap. Regularly measure realized benefits, evaluate progress against the benefits realization roadmap, and adjust the expected benefits as required.
3. Risk management
Leverage the cloud to lower risk profile.
Identify and quantify operational risks relating to infrastructure availability, reliability, performance, and security, as well as business risks relating to reputation, business continuity, and ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions. Understand how the cloud can help reduce risk profile and continue to iteratively identify and manage risk as part of agile cadence. Consider leveraging the cloud to decrease risks relating to infrastructure operation and failure. Reduce the need for large upfront infrastructure expenditures and reduce the risk of purchasing assets that may no longer be needed. Depending on the needs of users, mitigate procurement schedule risks by leveraging the cloud to instantly provision and deprovision resources.
4. Cloud financial management
Plan, measure, and optimize cloud spend.
Combine the ease of resource provisioning and agility benefits provided by the cloud with financial accountability for teams’ cloud spend. This helps ensure teams continuously optimize their cloud workloads and use the best pricing models. Clarify financial roles and responsibilities as they pertain to the cloud, and ensure that key stakeholders across finance, business, and technology organizations have a shared understanding of cloud costs. Evolve to a more dynamic forecasting and budgeting process and identify cost variances and anomalies faster.
Align account structure and tagging strategy with how organization and products map to the cloud. Structure accounts and cost allocation tags to map cloud resources to specific teams, projects, and business initiatives, and gain a granular view of consumption patterns. Define cost categories to organize cost and usage information using custom rules to simplify show back or chargeback. Use consolidated billing to help simplify cloud billing and realize volume discounts. Build guardrails to govern cloud usage in a scalable manner and with minimal impact to agility.
To avoid incurring technical debt, ensure workloads are Well-Architected, and operated in the most cost-effective manner. Leverage demand-based and time-based dynamic provisioning to pay only for the resources you need. Reduce cloud costs by identifying and eliminating spend associated with idle or underutilized cloud resources. Centralize the management of on-premises and cloud software licenses to reduce license-related cost overages, reduce non-compliance, and avoid misreporting. Differentiate between licenses that are included with cloud resources and licenses that you own.
Leverage rule-based controls on the consumption of licenses to set hard or soft limits on new and existing cloud deployments. Use dashboards to create visibility into license usage and accelerate vendor audits. Implement real-time alerts for non-compliance.
5. Application portfolio management
Manage and optimize application portfolio in support of business strategy.
Applications underpin business capabilities and link them to the associated resources. An accurate and complete application inventory will help identify opportunities for rationalization, migration, and modernization. An effective application portfolio management capability will help minimize application sprawl, facilitate application lifecycle planning, and ensure ongoing alignment with cloud transformation strategy.
Start with most critical applications, define them in terms of the overarching business capabilities, and map them to the underpinning software products and associated resources. Build a complete picture of each application by sourcing data from related enterprise systems, such as enterprise architecture, IT service management (ITSM), and project and portfolio management. Identify key technology and business stakeholders (including application owners) and request them to periodically enrich and validate application metadata. Assess the health of application portfolio on a regular basis with a view to maximizing the value that organization derives from its application investments.
6. Data governance
Exercise authority and control over data to meet stakeholder expectations.
Business processes and analytics capabilities depend on accurate, complete, timely, and relevant data. Define and assign key roles, including data owners, stewards, and custodians. Consider adopting a federated (data mesh) approach to governance. Specify standards, including data dictionaries, taxonomies, and business glossaries. Identify what datasets need to be referenced and model the relationships between reference data entities.
Develop data lifecycle policies and implement continuous compliance monitoring. Prioritize data quality efforts in line with strategic and operational data needs. Establish data quality standards: identify key quality attributes, business rules, metrics, and targets. Monitor data quality at every step of the data value chain. Identify root causes of data quality problems and improve relevant processes at the source. Implement data quality dashboards for critical data products.
7. Data curration
Collect, organize, access, and enrich metadata and use it to organize an inventory of data products in a Data Catalog.
A Data Catalog can help facilitate data monetization and self-service analytics by helping data consumers quickly locate relevant data products as well as understand their context, such as provenance and quality. Identify lead curators with responsibility for moderating the Data Catalog. In line with data monetization strategy, catalog key data products, including structured and unstructured data. Identify and capture relevant technical and business metadata, including lineage. Leverage standard ontologies, business glossaries, and automation (including machine learning) to tag, index, and auto-classify data. Augment with manual tagging as necessary and appropriately handle any personally identifiable information (PII). Consider crowdsourcing data enrichment through social curation. In other words, consider empowering data consumers to rate, review, and annotate data products.
