Cloud Movement - Is it Really as Spooky as it Seems?

Are you on the fence about Cloud implementation because of the horror stories you’ve heard about taking your enterprise into the daunting Cloud? This October, the only spooky stories you should be worried about are ones with ghosts and goblins!

Jade Global has been in the IT services business for 15+ years, and throughout that time, best practices and software solutions for enterprise resource planning, testing, business intelligence and application integration have drastically transformed due to one key factor; The Cloud. Our customers are just like you. They come from global businesses and industries including high-tech, software, retail, manufacturing and more. Many of the customers we work with daily have been Jade customers since the early 2000’s. Often the IT Directors, Finance Leaders and CFO’s have been in the same position for 10+ years. While their roles remain the same, the technology world around them continues to evolve. Grappling with the idea that a business process which has been used for years is no longer viable in today’s digital and connected world is not easy. As a result, many customers are on the fence and hesitant about moving to the Cloud. So, let’s take a deeper look at where this fear stems from.

The dreadful perception of Cloud has been created by users- creating mass hysteria about systems not working, while the CFO is happy because saving on costs. On the other hand, there are companies already implemented experiencing the post go-live symptoms…

Perception vs End Process..

Perception is based on users getting comfortable. What they forget is they have invested thousands of hours of customization and implementation in the old systems, and with Cloud, there is a false expectation that after day 1 of implementing Cloud things will be perfect. Things that previously took 2 years to implement now take 4 months. Need to give time to see the benefits, cannot expect instant results.

From a business perspective, what makes a company expectation that they will have a smooth transition to the Cloud? How does that change when ac company has implemented a completely new Cloud-based solution and it does not give the flexibility expected. From an organization perspective, they saved on license and infrastructure. As a user, where do I start? As a business owner, where do I start? Even though a solution is successful from a technical standpoint, there is not comfort with the system and it is difficult to get some benefit off of a completely new system compared to a system that has been matured over 15-20 years.

[Graphic within Blog: Show hysteria curve of Cloud over the course of the implementation from the end, where it peaks and rises, falls etc.
X Axis: Discovery Call, RFP, Start of project, Go-Live, Final Adoption
Y Axis: Level of concern/hysteria (level of happiness)]

At the end of the day, what we have seen is that customers are looking for an implementation system integrator, but they are not quite sure what their responsibility is. Different roles in the company have different expectations from a partner- The CFO vs end-users. Etc. The business needs to ask itself, "Who are we trying to satisfy- the end user or the CFO who made the decision to save on money?" In the market, we are saving customers money on systems that are best of breed, robust and does not need as much maintenance; from a commercial standpoint, we are saving $ but from the end-user it is not as intuitive as expected and how they were using it in the past. Refer this blog to learn Automating business processes with Approval Process in Salesforce