Building a Pivot-Ready Organization

In today’s world, organizations weighed down by legacy IT have trouble adapting, and one of the most significant measures of an agency’s flexibility is how much it relies on the cloud. But whether an agency goes all in for XaaS or tries more limited cloud services, pivoting to cloud technology requires a management strategy that sees years down the road. And the strategy itself must be nimble.

In the past year, GovLoop heard from government thought leaders who shepherded cloud-based changes through their organizations. They identified priorities, acknowledged concerns and spoke about the future.

Here are their thoughts on becoming a pivot-ready organization.

Tips for Structural Change

Choosing from the menu of cloud services is like standing at a buffet with dozens of tempting options.

But regardless of the cloud solution you choose — or the process you want to improve — there are ways to make change palatable for the people and entities involved. And no single approach is enough.

“The government is a living organism, just like the rest of us,” said Dorothy Aronson, Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Data Officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF). “It’s always growing, always changing…. So, for me, government transformation now is thinking about our future a little bit differently and with the concept of continuous change and continuous modernization always in mind.”

Strategy

Building a pivot-ready organization starts with evaluating your current environment and crafting a strategy focused on your specific objectives and desired outcomes. From there, decide what supporting tasks a cloud services provider can handle and what more mission-specific tasks should remain in house. Break your overarching strategy into smaller, more manageable pieces.

“We need to understand where we want to be in five years and constantly be building little pieces to that endpoint,” Aronson said.

André Mendes, CIO at the Commerce Department, explained it this way: “Cloud migration is and will continue to be a journey that will see a substantial number of iterations taking place, even as the cloud itself evolves.”

A relatively gentle approach is more practical than trying to migrate everything to the cloud at once. But you need a blueprint that outlines your short-, mid- and long-term initiatives, or you risk creating a fragmented IT infrastructure. Moving to the cloud without a coherent plan for how all systems can and might integrate causes trouble.

A good strategy also recognizes financial truths, Mendes said. “The reality is that there is a substantial amount of time during which there is some parallelism of both [old and new] operations, and the federal government has not ever had a good solution for parallel efforts, for the same tasks being equally financed,” he said.

To see more of our experts’ ideas on using cloud and cloud-based services to help your agency adapt to change, download our guide. “How to be a Pivot-Ready Organization.”