Balancing requirements with a structured approach
For any organization, building a cloud-first systems roadmap calls for a structured approach. You need to align cloud technologies with your business objectives, and at the same time make sure what you’re doing is scalable, secure and cost efficient.
With Higher Education, you have added complexities, like aligning a decentralized workforce and demonstrating improvements to the student experience. All balanced with the need for flexible, modern functionality.
Throw in the inevitable differences in organizational culture, and there’s really no way to fully explore this topic in a single blog… but here are three key steps to get you started, along with some links to explore further.
Step one: Define your business goals and cloud strategy
Moving to cloud should never be a strategy in itself. Instead, the technology you choose has the primary role of supporting the university’s overall strategy. This means your first step is to understand that strategy and what you need to do to deliver your mission.
- Identify the capabilities needed to deliver effective teaching and research. This includes direct capabilities like curriculum and management, along with indirect activities like paying the university’s bills and hiring staff. Find out more about this in our blog about capability models.
- Develop your business objectives. These are elements like scalability, cost optimization or innovation. Start thinking about how these align to the capabilities you need to deliver. For example, cost optimization will mean different things if you’re looking at managing the university estate compared to planning academic workloads or making procurement improvements. We explore this further in our blog about planning your project.
- Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for success. It might sound trite, but what gets measured gets done. Having robust KPIs helps in multiple ways, but key at this point is driving the business case for cloud (or any technology) and driving staff behavior.
Step two: Assess your current state
To create your roadmap you need to understand your starting point as well as where you want to go. This provides important information about potential risks, timescales and impact on the business. You don’t necessarily need to do a full AS IS process mapping exercise, but it’s important to understand the different challenges and opportunities across the business. You can find out more in our blog about how to establish your starting point, but at high level this includes:
- Create an inventory of existing systems and data. Identify applications, infrastructure, reports and dependencies. Look at data quality and evaluate how much cleaning is required.
- Assess workloads. Classify workloads based on criticality, performance needs, and security requirements.
- Evaluate efficiency and effectiveness. Examine how labor intensive different areas of the business are as well as whether they are error prone, and how much effort is required to address errors.
- Evaluate change readiness. Honestly evaluate the openness of staff and other university constituents to changing the way they work in this area.
Step three: Develop your cloud adoption roadmap
- Start by evaluating your starting point. Prioritize the areas of the business that should be addressed. Here you’ll need to balance areas with greatest need for improvement against those with the greatest impact on overall business goals.
- Estimate high-level timeframes for each of the projects. Consider the complexity of the change, especially as it relates to the number of systems and/or dependencies involved. Also take into account the amount of risk identified in delivering the solution.
- Now you can start organizing your projects against a timeline. In addition to your high priority areas, you may wish to consider some quick wins. Smaller early successes deliver fast return on investment and generate change momentum, which is also good for morale.
With your roadmap in hand, your next key step is to make sure you have robust governance procedures in place, and begin thinking about which aspects of work the university will own and which you want to outsource to a third-party.
If you’d like some help with your roadmap, or a chat about where to focus your transformation project, the HE experts are Inoapps are always here to chat.