How the CTO can drive the enterprise’s shift to the cloud?
Over the last few decades, the role and responsibility of average CTOs have changed a lot. The cloud’s introduction has brought a new scheme and ensures a driving force for enterprises to shift to the cloud.
What has become the major intertwining issue which affects each decision? Risk identification, budget management, and innovation often control all. CTOs see the cloud as a huge opportunity to tackle business and technical challenges. From a technology point of view, it helps with legacy infrastructure, obsolescence costs, and the team’s high onboarding expenditure. Adopting clouds help staff approach more agile methods of working and enable new business models.
The biggest challenge is how to bring c-suite and board itself from cloud-sceptic to cloud-native organisation. Building cloud culture and benefits seen by other team members, along with CTO, is crucial. This happens especially in large organisations where decades of legacy systems have become deeply ingrained with business culture. Even if members accept the technology change, the CTO will still have to face challenges and barriers to overcome to ensure a smooth transition of new technology.
Bringing your organisation into the cloud-era needs a culture shift, and thus CTO cannot act alone. The CTO must actively champion the business and embrace to move to the cloud.
CTO role in managing risk, reputation and responsibilities carefully
The concept of risk is a good start. The CTO and CISO see enterprise shift to cloud as a risk-minimiser and a tight, controlled environment for managing everything from data to applications; on the contrary, the senior team considers the risk of data leaks, security risk, and downtime and may feel hesitant to adopt the change.
New technology at work often generates a range of emotions. These emotions include the frustration of relearning, an embarrassment of not grasping fast or fear of losing jobs. If the day-to-day tech seems working fine, then there is very less desire to change. Many business leaders receive guidance and strategy development from the top, and some leaders oversee culture change driven by technology as unnerving. The CTO can use this opportunity to empower each department’s top staff member to adopt the cloud change and bring the best solutions to the entire organisation.
The rise in technology means CTO is no longer seen as a business cost centre but can generate increased revenue. The key ally for CTO can be the CFO, which helps understand the difference between moving from the CAPEX model to the OPEX model. Cloud migration certainly makes an attractive deal with fewer sunk costs and investments into expensive hardware. However, billing in the cloud is not as easy and transparent as many CFP might imagine. Reporting and restructuring the budget takes time.
For a CTO, it is totally a new challenge and opportunity of taking a positive and proactive role in the business model, finances and scale of operations. This requires a mindset shift and a change of responsibility.
Move from CTO to CPO
CTO is not just a technical role. The title explains a lot. Well, technology means more than technical management. The role of CTO, especially those operating in large enterprises rapidly rolling out new platforms and solutions, are often akin to CPO (chief product officer). To drive successful change to the world, a CTO must champion the user and not the technology.
If you are driving change within your organisation, user experience comes first. There is a possibility of inevitable friction when new technology comes across a business. To minimise the impact and embrace new systems, IT teams take measures and actively ease the stress. The worst case is if employees are not aware of it and they find out when they open their computers on one fine Monday morning.
In the global business environment, it is often expected that business can replicate, launch and relaunch anywhere, anytime. But it is far from reality. CTO should actively know the pitfalls in plans and operate worldwide with the limitations of the cloud. These pitfalls can be data regulations preventing your app from working, barriers that stop service operating at an acceptable speed and regional technology skill gaps. Of course, onboarding costs will be excruciatingly high.
If CTOs are aware of these pitfalls and how it will affect user experience, they are better equipped to inform operations, legal, customer support, and product development teams. Accepting cloud change requires CTO to manage the expectations of stakeholders about what is feasible in every market. It is pointless to paint a picture of limitless innovation and opportunity just to fail at the last hurdle.
Unlock huge potential later by just investing in time now.
There is more opportunity for CTOs looking to drive a culture change to the cloud. To avail the exciting possibilities of frontier technology requires you to implement a well-integrated cloud foundation in your organisation. Your business needs to be cloud-native to avail opportunities presented by AI, machine learning, and data analysis.
There is a lot more to unfold as benefits include predicting customer behaviour to harness self coding AI to perform routine tasks more quickly. But before this, tackle the most tricky part, which is to shepherd the organisation through initial changes.
Accept change or leave innovation on the wayside.
Cloud enables the pace of change, and this is extraordinary. Harness the power of the cloud within the enterprise by increasing development teams and technology.
As business culture isn’t keeping up with the technological change, the cloud’s potential remains untapped. Without a definite business decision, we will get stuck with innovation and business growth opportunities left by the wayside.
The cloud and its attendants have not spelt the end of CTO or CIO. The new technology has revolutionised relevance at the senior level, demanding greater interaction and cooperation.
The CTO needs to take action and champion this cause within the organisation and help cloud and business strategies in the same direction. If you are looking for CTO-as-a-service and want to implement cloud and meet your business needs simultaneously, contact us for detailed information.
