Nitin Rakesh is the CEO and Executive Director of Mphasis and co-author of the award-winning book "Transformation in Times of Crisis."
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Many of us in the technology industry have been saying it for years: Change is coming. What has taken everyone by surprise is the speed with which it has rolled in. From having once been something that was an afterthought, technology has raced to occupy a prominent seat at the corporate high table.
This means tech is no longer the purview of the IT department alone. Instead, senior leaders, including CEOs, need to refresh their approach toward it and its place in companies according to evolving business requirements.
One of the most important shifts CEOs should be willing to undertake is to become front-seat evangelists for the cloud. Why? Because the cloud facilitates communication, flexibility and collaboration—key functions in a fast-changing world. It enables a quick, seamless move to an online mode for enterprises that may have been only a brick-and-mortar presence so far.
A recent forecast confirms the trend: End-user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach nearly $500 billion—a 20.4% increase from $410.9 billion in 2021. Contrary to the pre-pandemic years when investing in cloud services could at times be driven by a sense of "reckless exuberance," cloud spending now is expected to be done with a clear outcome in sight: to help achieve highly specific technology and business objectives.
This is where the CEO’s role comes into focus. Although Covid-19 pushed every company’s CTO and CIO to the frontlines of company strategy and operations, the full-scale, company-wide adoption of cloud technologies can only really be considered fully done when there is cross-departmental buy-in led from the top.
Let's take a closer look to see what this means.
Investing For Business
One of the first major challenges businesses face when wanting to accelerate cloud adoption, for example, is how to manage the cost. As things stand, prevailing mechanisms around technology funding can slow down and even prevent cloud adoption. Tech funding typically values functions required by a company now rather than strategic infrastructure investments that could deliver high value, more easily, later.
However, every tiny bit of tactical functionality created without the cloud or its infrastructure adds to a company’s future technical debt. It adds complexity to the potential for creating or executing anything new and agile in the future.
CEOs can play a key role in enabling senior leadership to understand that early and timely investments in the cloud can provide a solid foundation for competitive advantage. Once the leadership team sees it this way, everything clicks into place, including the typical processes followed around technology funding. CEO intervention can help inspire the shift from prioritizing short-term projects to more long-term, ongoing products/platforms.
Integrating IT And Business
The second way in which CEOs can help companies leverage a move to the cloud is by putting systems and processes in place to incentivize a coming together of IT and business functions. It can make a business more customer-focused, agile and flexible when everyone is dealing with it—whether product managers or IT heads.
What CEOs can do to facilitate it is help in the creation of modular platforms tasked with providing agile solutions while running as a service. These platforms can serve as model examples of the cloud in action by seeding agility in the company’s IT architecture while ensuring synergies across functional units and departments. The cloud has been a game-changer in the past few decades, as it provides a highly scalable, flexible and cost-effective environment for organizations to move at the speed of the customer. Organizations that leverage it to hyperpersonalize their services will be able to improve customer experience, which is key in today's market.
Another area in which CEOs can help companies leverage the benefits of the cloud is in the area of risk management. CEOs can help co-create a workable risk appetite. This can be done by keeping the company’s current and future goals and business strategy in mind.
Aligning Talent For The Cloud
Once investment in the cloud and a new operating model are in place, what CEOs can do is usher in the changes required in HR policy to ensure the right talent is in place to leverage cloud technology. This can mean a reversal in existing talent policies that may have prioritized hiring talent from low-cost locations. With the cloud, it is important for businesses to have a small group of highly skilled people who can take charge and lead the digital transformation.
This will require a clear shift in talent-hiring policies that will benefit from the CEO taking a clear lead.
Covid-19 has made it imperative for businesses to adopt digital transformation journeys in order to meet their customers in the way they want to be met at a location and time of their choosing. When CEOs step up to ensure their companies are adapting to the cloud as a team, they set them up for success.
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