The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 29

The Hard Reality
We see the same story play out over and over again within the enterprise -- people and
process slowing down cloud adoption. Part of the problem is that we cloud technolo-
gists typically subscribe to a pure technology solution. We invest a heavy trust in the
power of our designs. Who dare question the obvious benefits of on-demand and API
driven cloud infrastructures?
Unfortunately, we all know too well the many dead bodies laid to rest in the “You build
it and they will come” project graveyard. So why do most cloud adoption programs
flounder to achieve their promise for agility and speed? We find the majority of cloud
initiatives inadequately invest resources to address the most common obstacle: Peo-
ple’s natural response to resist, and even obstruct, technology and process change.
Why Do People Resist the Cloud?
The bottom line is the cloud is a transformative technology. It threatens the status quo
of the technologist’s traditional roles and responsibilities in the large enterprise. The
cloud forces companies to adopt new paradigms for how they consume and provision
their infrastructure. The cloud compels them to build out an entirely new array of service
capabilities, which in turn forces the adoption of new processes and people competen-
cies. Infrastructure is no longer a physical asset and an operational and service manage-
ment problem. Infrastructure in the cloud era is a software design and a development
management problem.
A major cloud initiative introduces an entirely new set of technologies. This means work-
ers need to retool and acquire new skills. For example, network engineers no longer
manage firewall and router hardware configurations, but instead must learn how to
manage virtual private clouds and build their network architectures engineered as code.
The cloud displaces the demand for certain roles and increases demand for others. The
enterprise compute and network consumers can expect to provision their infrastructure
by a self-service portal. No longer do they provision their hardware via service tickets
and by centralized edict. Automation eliminates the need for long meetings with cadres
of system engineers and project managers. In the cloud, any provisioning task can be
reduced to the click of a button or a software API call.
An Introduction to the Organizational Change Manage-
ment Performance Model
Is a cloud adoption initiative any different than any other organizational change man-
agement project? What we’ve learned over the years is the resistance to the cloud is
really the same people opposition you see in any major enterprise transformation proj-
ect. Consequently, we can turn to the same tools provided by organizational change
management and process re-engineering fields. Figure 1 illustrates an introduction to
what is commonly called the “Organizational Change Management Performance Curve.”
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