Why self-discovery is key to a successful cloud journey

Business leaders should play an active role in determining the metrics for success in a cloud migration project.

May 17, 2023 | By Brian Copeland

Self-discovery means empowering business leaders to determine their own metrics for success. It’s giving them the tools to identify the goals and challenges that a cloud transformation can help them conquer. The more you can own the metrics that define and measure value for your business, the more likely you are to make meaningful business decisions based on those metrics.

Without self-discovery, what happens?

Without self-discovery, you let someone else come in and define what success looks like for you. This is less than ideal for several reasons.

The first? No one will ever know your business as well as you do! An outside resource may be one of the best players in their field, but only you possess the nuanced understanding that comes from working within your technology and business domain day-in and day-out. Without support from internal resources, they might make incorrect assumptions about key processes that will inevitably lead to flaws in their strategy.

A lack of self-discovery can also mean a lack of commitment to change. Migrating to the cloud shouldn’t mean taking your existing data, moving it somewhere else and then operating in the exact same fashion as before. If you do that, you’re missing out on an incredible array of strategies to propel your business forward. When self-discovery drives a cloud migration project, you’re encouraged to consider all the ways your data is utilized and how your workflows can be optimized. You gain the opportunity to use your data as a true business asset that can be monetized to better reach and engage your customer. You become invested in the project from the get-go and more excited about reaching your goals.

Self-discovery prevents one of the most common cloud mistakes

Self-discovery can also help businesses avoid one of the most common causes of lackluster cloud migration projects: a reactive state of mind. If an enterprise only undertakes a cloud migration project as a last resort—whether that’s to cut costs or avoid losing data in an on-premises solution—then “just getting it done” becomes the general mindset.

If there are existing problems with disorganized data or inefficient workflows, migrating to the cloud won’t fix them. You have essentially just changed the zip code of your problems. They need to be addressed before a migration begins or at least accounted for in the cloud strategy. A thorough self-discovery process does this by giving stakeholders the opportunity to take a hard look at their existing infrastructure before a single piece of data is moved. It also provides an opportunity for users at all levels to be on the same page before work begins, giving change leaders the chance to communicate to their teams.

How self-discovery guides cloud migration strategy

You don’t have to worry about doing all the work yourself. An experienced partner should guide you on your path to self-discovery by knowing the right questions to ask. You can think of self-discovery like a series of thought exercises and self-evaluations designed to objectively measure the state of the business. Ask questions like:

• How is the cloud going to transform the business?
• What types of data are we processing, and at what volumes?
• What do we ultimately want to do with that data?
• What needs to be done to make that happen?
• Who needs access to that data?
• How can I turn my data into a strategic asset?

Asking these questions and working through the answers allows you to take stock of your existing infrastructure and gives you the opportunity to plan improvements before a migration starts. That’s where the true value of an outside expert comes in handy. If you determine that you want your data to do something it isn’t currently doing and you don’t know how to make it happen, a partner like TEKsystems will have the knowledge and experience to get you there.