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A cloud computing wake-up call

More choice for end-users puts all suppliers to the test

Published 16:08, 30 July 10

Tags: applications

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I recently spoke at a Netsuite event titled “a cloud computing wake-up call for professional services”. I had my wake-up call several years ago but the session attracted a wide spectrum of views - the strong believers in Cloud, some staunch skeptics and many who still sit on the fence wondering when the tsunami of change is going to hit them.

I for one, believe that the tsunami is already upon us. The change is not all-encompassing where everything moves to the cloud, at least not for enterprise-level organizations. However, adoption is accelerating. At the event, I talked about a preliminary survey by the Accenture Institute for High Performance that illustrates the shift.

Of the 656 survey respondents from around the world, over 39% are using cloud today across the different types of cloud capabilities available. For the rest, over 42% are piloting or exploring cloud.

What’s particularly interesting is that in the software-as-a-service (or cloud applications) category, 22% of the survey respondents are running what they call ‘critical’ applications in the cloud. That’s surely a shift where previously few enterprise companies would trust their ‘critical’ apps to the cloud.

As this change facing clients gathers pace, I argued that professional services companies need to respond and change the way that they serve their clients accordingly. In some cases, this change is profound. I shared a client example illustrating the point. We’re working with a global high-tech company seeking to expand their use of indirect sales and services channels to help extend their high growth.

Cloud computing was ideally suited to support this area because their internal sales organization already used a cloud platform and it offered an attractive way to enable thousands of external channel partners as well.

The issue was that the client had yet to define the end-to-end business process that would facilitate a behaviour change both internally and across the channel partners. The client recognized the need for process-reengineering but didn’t want to wait 3 months before starting to roll out something to their partners, and they wanted to demonstrate some real business results within a quarter.

An innovative approach was used where they went live within 2 weeks with a subset of channel partners. The process reengineering was then managed ‘in Production’ through an iterative program over the following quarter. A set of business metrics were agreed to guide how both the process and the application were changed every 2 weeks as progress was monitored.

The approach demanded immense collaboration across different global on-shore and off-shore teams. The results were stunning with very strong engagement across the channel partners allowing the overall program to be deployed much more rapidly than previously planned and with tangible business results - generating 10,000 news leads per month.

I was asked where is the ‘sweet-spot’ for this type of approach. We see them well suited to cases where the proof-points for business value need to be validated with ‘hands on’ experience and indeed, where business models are often in flux.

However, the agility to test ideas and experiment comes with trade-offs. For example, integration is sometimes more challenging in these cases and demands that an architecture roadmap considers specific processes that require agility then followed by automation and deep integration once the processes have stabilized.

In order to support these types of engagements, the changes necessary for professional IT and consulting services are considerable. In the first instance, architecture planning and sequencing around a cloud model require deep insight around the cloud platforms.

Industry IP is key to provide a rapid ‘jumpstart’ for a client for both the business process and application that can be iterated in production. Many organizations are increasingly using agile software development methods and these need to be extended to support cloud application configuration, and business process reengineering as well.

Off-shore teams now come out of the back-room and are more client-facing - of course, facilitated by better collaboration technologies. Release management procedures now incorporate more flexibility for iterative development combined with the appropriate controls for in-situ Production changes - the traditional maintenance cycle is now turned on its head.

Finally, a suite of cloud-specific tools are proving to be essential to facilitate how these projects are run. For example at Accenture, the Accenture SaaS Delivery Toolkit includes estimating and capacity models, SaaS governance workflows and cloud platform assessments embedded into our methodology.

In my view, while these tools and approaches are powerful in themselves in helping clients secure the benefits of cloud computing, the real value is the renewed focus on the business and IT architecture decisions that really matter. Traditional on-premise implementations have been too often consumed by the sheer effort of standing up an entirely new in-house capability; cloud computing provides some release from that.

My own cloud computing wake-up call happened in 2004. I was helping a client to select their global platform for CRM. At first, it was a surprise to me that cloud capability like Salesforce.com, which was only just emerging at that time, could make the shortlist for such a large-scale diverse business. Then as we did more analysis, we recognized that it more than met the bar for most enterprise-level needs.

My eyes opened to the entirely new possibilities that a cloud platform offered. Of course the rest is history where the entire cloud category has scaled and matured further for the enterprise. It now offers capabilities beyond CRM, into HR, Supply Chain and ERP, and also for custom development.

The key take-away for professional services companies, is the constant evolution that’s necessary in approaches, tools, skills in order to serve clients in this area. That part of the journey is just starting and more is yet to come.

Saideep Raj, Accenture Global SaaS Lead