The business perspective focuses on ensuring that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes. It comprises eight capabilities. Common stakeholders include the CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, and CTO.
1. Strategy management
Leverage the cloud to accelerate business outcomes.
Consider how cloud services can support and shape long-term business goals.
Identify opportunities for retiring technical debt and leveraging the cloud to optimize technology and business operations.
Explore new cloud-enabled value propositions and revenue models.
Consider how new or improved cloud-enabled products and services can help reach new customers.
Prioritize strategic objectives and evolve strategy over time in response to technological developments and changes in business environment.
2. Portfolio management
Focus on cloud products and initiatives that are in line with strategic intent, operational efficiency, and capacity to deliver.
Delivering the right cloud products and initiatives at the right time will help operationalize strategy and accelerate business outcomes. Leverage automated discovery tools and the seven common migration strategies for moving applications to the cloud (known as the 7 Rs) to rationalize existing application portfolio and build a data-driven business case.
Balance cloud portfolio by considering short-term and long-term outcomes as well as low-risk (proven) and higher-risk (experimental) opportunities. Include migration, modernization, and innovation initiatives, and consider financial benefits (lower costs and/or increased revenue) as well as non-financial benefits (for example, improved customer and employee experience). Optimize the business value of portfolio in line with resource, financial, and schedule constraints. To reduce time to value, consider increasing the frequency of planning cycles or adopting a continuous planning strategy.
3. Innovation management
Leverage the cloud to develop new processes, products, and experiences and improve existing ones.
By enabling to instantly provision and shut down resources, the cloud can help reduce time to value and innovation-related cost and risk. To fully take advantage of the potential for increased business agility that comes with cloud adoption, develop an innovation strategy that includes a mix of incremental innovation initiatives focused on optimizing existing products, processes, and experiences, as well as disruptive innovation initiatives focused on enabling new business models. Create mechanisms for soliciting and selecting ideas in line with strategic priorities, and develop an end-to-end process for scaling successful innovation pilots.
4. Product management
Manage data and cloud-enabled offerings as products through their lifecycles.
Organizing teams around these products, which deliver repeatable value to internal and external customers, will help become more agile and customer centric. Develop a balanced product portfolio that supports business strategy. Establish small, enduring, and empowered cross-functional teams that champion the needs of internal and external customers. Identify product owners, understand customer journeys, define, and create product roadmaps, and manage end-to-end product lifecycles and associated value streams. Leverage cloud platform and agile methods to rapidly iterate and evolve. Reduce dependencies between product teams and effectively integrate them into broader operating model via well-defined interfaces.
5. Strategic partnership
Build or grow business through a strategic partnership with cloud provider.
If you offer cloud-hosted software solutions, cloud-integrated products, or cloud related professional, consulting, or managed services, strategically partnering with cloud provider can help build cloud expertise, promote solutions to customers, and drive successful customer engagements. As you progress along partnership journey, leverage promotional credits, funding benefits, and co-selling opportunities to help build or grow business. Leverage cloud provider’s marketplace channel to expand reach and take advantage of its technical resources to help mature cloud-based products and services. Publish joint case studies to highlight success in solving specific business challenges.
6. Data monetization
Leverage data to obtain measurable business benefit.
The cloud facilitates the collection, storage, and analysis of vast amounts of data. To obtain measurable business benefits, develop a comprehensive and long-term data monetization strategy that’s aligned with your strategic intent. Identify opportunities for leveraging data and analytics to improve operations, customer and employee experience, and decision-making, as well as to enable new business models. For example, consider leveraging customer behavior insights to drive hyper personalization and localization, micro-segmentation, subscriber retention, loyalty and rewards programs, and the like. Focus on transactional value that helps understand and complete business transactions, informational value that helps describe past performance and infer conclusions, and analytical value that helps automate activities, guide decisions, and predict outcomes. First monetize data internally within organization before considering opportunities for external monetization (for example, selling data via a marketplace).
7. Business insights
Gain real-time insights and answer questions about your business.
Near-real-time descriptive insights can help complete data monetization strategy by enabling you to track business performance, improve decision-making, and optimize operations. Establish cross-functional analytics teams with a good understanding of the business context. Focus on both technical skills such as statistics and nontechnical skills such as visualization and communication. Align analytics efforts with business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Leverage the Data Catalog to locate relevant data products, and visualization tools and techniques to discover trends, patterns, and relationships in the data. Focus on the “big picture” first and drill down into the details as required.
8. Data science
Leverage experimentation, advanced analytics, and machine learning to solve complex business problems.
Predictive and prescriptive analytics can help complete data monetization strategy by enabling to improve operational effectiveness and decision-making as well as customer and employee experience. Once identified opportunities for business process transformation, ensure that Data Catalog contains the data products required to support the building, training, and testing of machine learning models. Leverage continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to improve operational resilience and reproducibility of machine learning workflows. Understand how models make predictions and identify any potential biases. Deploy suitable models to production and monitor their performance. To mitigate risk, delegate low-confidence predictions for human review.
