Change management

Most IT organizations have a program management office (PMO) of one form or another. The PMO’s
function is to ensure that changes entail minimal risk and disruption to the IT function. In moving to
the cloud, the PMO will need to manage new change management functions. These include the
following:

 Operational readiness, to ensure the operations or DevOps function is ready to manage a cloudresident
application

 User readiness, in the case of functional changes to applications

 Organizational readiness, to ensure (for example) that dependent applications continue to
function and that all security, compliance, and financial requirements are completed

 Application and ecosystem readiness, to ensure applications moving to the cloud and applications
that are remaining but integrated with the cloud applications are fully tested and ready, and that
all issues are known in advance.

There are other aspects of governance (for example, supplier management). However, it should now
be clear that governance in the cloud, by and large, extends existing functions, and professionals in
each of these areas should consider the impact of cloud applications to their space.

Migrating applications to the cloud is an important and significant activity, requiring changes to how
both businesses and IT operate. In this chapter, we have described how to form and use a Cloud
Strategy Team to drive the migration; how to involve the many organizational stakeholders; how to
prioritize application migration; and how to extend existing governance activities. Of equal importance are the transformational aspects of the cloud, which should be examined and performed concurrently with migration. In Chapter 5, we outline what we mean by transformative innovation and the opportunities afforded by the cloud.

Source of Information : Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Strategy

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