Are you capturing all the value you can from your cloud-based application investments? Is the rapid change of pace and enhancements challenging your ability to know what you own?
In the past, we developed a business plan for an application generally focusing on one to five important attributes of value. Then we designed, constructed, tested, implemented and managed the system focused on those value elements. Over the life of that application (8-25 years), we would occasionally identify additional capabilities of value. The simple enhancements, and patching, were made every 3-6 months as we had deployment windows but the major enhancements, or upgrades, were major projects with high costs for the business. As a result, we generally discouraged the business from requesting these enhancements. Or, in many cases, we, or the business, resorted to purchasing additional point solutions to provide the needed additional features.
As we have made the shift to the cloud, we are enjoying the speed of deployment and lower implementation costs. We are loving the fact that those daunting upgrades are a thing of the past; however, the blistering pace at which the software vendor is now releasing enhancements to our environment has handed us a new challenge.
Organizations now face challenges surrounding:
- An ability to stay aware of new capabilities
- An understanding of the inherent business value of the new capabilities
- An understanding of the key players in the organization who have a need for these new features
- An awareness of potential duplication of capabilities with multiple systems
- The desire to stay ahead of the business users as they discover new and unknown features
The vast majority of the market has adjusted their implementation processes to some form of Agile. However, only a small part of the market has adjusted their IT operations to capitalize on the additional value that cloud software providers are offering. Leading organizations have implemented processes to monitor the health, security and value of their systems on an ongoing basis. At a minimum, organizations should review the value of each solution on an annual basis. Most of the time this process identifies opportunities for significant savings by reducing redundancy or automating manual processes.
For more information around Covenant’s Managed Services Solutions, please contact Doug Meyer at DMeyer@mailctp.com