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Culture Eats Cloud Computing For Breakfast

There is plenty of agreement that culture outweighs technology in technology business strategy. Cloud computing is right in the center of business technology, and therefore, its success depends on the culture is in place in the organization. What can an executive or manager do to bring culture around to get the most value out of cloud?

Managers need to understand the unique aspects of their own corporate cultures plunging into cloud computing in a big way. That’s the word from Moe Abdula and a team of co-authors from IBM in their latest work, The Cloud Adoption Playbook. Many companies adopt the cloud to support innovation and rapid change, but those companies may not understand the fundamental cultural changes needed to make this adoption successful, they point out.

Here are the key touchpoints of culture that shape cloud success:

Willingness to embrace change: There are two types of companies, Abdula and his co-authors state: those that are nimble and embrace rapid decisions and changes, and those that slowly and deliberately ponder decisions. “They fall int the trap of making too many changes at the same time and then rejecting them as a set when the results don’t meet expectations. Or they don’t give changes enough time to work before they reject the results of a set of changes. The authors urge a shift to data-driven decision-making.

Decision-making style:  Organizational cultures range from those in which “decisions come from the top down, culture is often characterized by a very hierarchical management style,” ranging to the opposite extreme which is “consensus-driven decision-making. All team members are consulted or at least polled, and decisions are made jointly.” The authors recommend that cloud teams be provided well-defined levels of autonomy. “The team also needs to clearly understand what level of decision-making and accountability it has.”

Attitude toward risk: Some organizations, especially those in highly regulated industries, “suffer from excessive fear of the unknowns,”  the authors point out.  “The problem occurs when this caution extends all the way down to the smallest decisions — when teams become afraid to try new programming tools, frameworks, or development practices simply because they are new.” On the other extreme, there are “organizations have a culture of always going for broke — fear of missing out.” For all companies, the authors recommend controlled experimentation — “teams should carefully consider their process for working through a technical issue that goes beyond the expertise of the teams and consider what to do about a problem that has two or more viable solutions.”

Talent and flexibility: The move to cloud computing results in “more generalists and fewer specialists.” Abdula and his co-authors say. “When you adopt the cloud, you will find that some types of current IT specialists are no longer needed, especially when building cloud-native applications.” In addition, “your organization will become less compartmentalized and more integrated. To react quickly enough to a rapidly changing business environment, in an optimal environment for cloud development, the organizations merge into a new organization called DevOps.”” – Forbes

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