EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Mapping your cloud migration strategy

Organizations that have waited to move their applications to the cloud now have more insights to help them
develop a plan and guide their strategy. They also have more choices to make in defining their approach to the
cloud thanks to increasing options from cloud solutions providers. This range of options allows each business to
choose the path that best serves its strategic needs and risk profile. But, identifying the right path for your business
will require your teams to do their homework before considering all the alternatives, in order to make sure they find
a strategy that best matches your objectives.

Identifying and prioritizing business and technology objectives

Mapping your current ecosystem and identifying the gaps that must be addressed is key to any cloud strategy.
Legacy software often requires expert users to manage and create workflows that require near-manual handoffs
between organizations that use different applications to manage their business. In addition, your legacy software
might be considerably behind current versions due to customizations that were needed to adapt software to
your business. Because of these customizations, this software would need to be updated in order to work with
new versions.

There’s tremendous value in modernizing your technology ecosystem with cloud technology, including
the ability to more easily keep your capabilities current and reducing the load on your internal resources.

infor.com
 While considering these changes may be daunting, there’s Our lifeblood is the front line of the retail store.
tremendous value in modernizing your technology ecosystem By providing our front-line workers with reporting
with cloud technology, including the ability to more easily keep at their fingertips, sales and customer service have
your capabilities current and reducing the load on your internal improved. All our employees, including executives,
resources. Or as McKinsey puts it: " By viewing cloud look at the same numbers and make better decisions
computing as a starting point for IT automation, companies as a result. All of this value has definitely contributed
may be able to have it all: scalability, agility, flexibility, efficiency, to a positive ROI.”
and cost savings. But that’s only possible by building up both
DAVID CLOTHIER
automation and cloud capabilities.” Vice President of Finance, Treasurer & Controller, CPA, Pilot Flying J1

To prioritize your migration phases, you should consider the

time to return on the upgrade investment. Begin by considering
the functionality that serves focused business silos; this can be
a good way to start your cloud journey without requiring
Rather, the goal should be to consider a comprehensive set
alignment and effort from large numbers of people across
of needs to incorporate how certain functions work with each
departments. This option works well when you can visualize the
other, how the applications need to interact with external
potential for significant costs savings with a business process.
entities such as suppliers and partners, and how business
Organizational culture change can drive an analytics-first strategies and market dynamics may affect requirements
attitude. This can be achieved through leaving applications in over time.
place but moving data to the cloud, enabling insights across
The team should include an architecture function that can
data silos and accurate monitoring of enterprise KPIs.
identify critical needs for integration, scalability, performance,
For businesses that have the capacity to take on more and technology maintenance. This sub-team should be
substantive change, moving to a modern, cloud-based maximizing the future agility of the new platform for ease of
enterprise resource planning (ERP) or digital operations extension and provide options for future requirements that
platform opens up a wide range of potential, including more may develop.
inclusive and consistent workflows, a common user experience
across the organization, and mobile access to critical tools
and data to support work wherever employees need it.
Detailing the business case
“These next-generation digital operations platforms (DOPs)— After developing the basic approach, your team should work
spanning finance, customer operations, supply chain, product, with financial planning to determine the ROI model for the
and people/talent—play a critical role in powering modern initial phase(s) of the migration. It’s always a good idea to
business and delivering customer experience,” observes choose initial projects that can provide a strong tangible
Forrester. Additionally, many modern ERP systems can also contribution to the business once implemented.
be fine-tuned to your specific industry, reducing the time to
implement as well as customizations to meet all your company By focusing on time to value, the early stages of the migration
specific requirements. effort can create resource availability and productivity to
support future projects that might be necessary for overall goals
but have a longer horizon to return.
Assembling a team to drive change
The business case KPIs should be shared with potential partners
Teams that execute successful transformations are inclusive. and vendors to make sure that they also target the correct
These teams bring together business and technical metrics in their implementations. Starting with a pre-project
stakeholders to develop a holistic set of requirements for both baseline, be prepared to continuously review progress on
the near term and the long term. Mapping these needs business KPIs as the project proceeds to help maximize ROI
shouldn’t be confused with creating detailed requirements— and prove the success of the project.
specifics will change over time during your different
migration phases.

infor.com Mapping your cloud migration strategy 2

Preparing your data for the cloud For your cloud project to succeed, you must look beyond
achieving a successful implementation and instead look at
Bringing data together from disparate systems can be how you can drive cultural evolution by identifying better
challenging, but it is an essential step to realizing cloud value. ways to collaborate.
By aggregating data across the enterprise, businesses can gain
the visibility to align operations and employees.

The first step for most organizations is to assess data

cleanliness and try to address data quality through improved
Your partners should recognize that time to value will dictate
input and archiving unnecessary data or data that cannot be
a phased approach with clear milestones for tangible business
trusted to aid future decisions. Bringing data together for
contributions. They should focus on business KPIs during the
application integration and analytics requires a clear and strong
implementation and post-deployment phases of the project
approach to application integration, including the definition of
to demonstrate the business case.
data exchange standards and semantic maps to contextualize
data once it’s been aggregated. For ongoing management of
data exchanges, API-driven interfaces should be prioritized to Planning for the next phases
maximize scalability and flexibility.
After the initial phases of the project, the value you achieve
should be shared across the enterprise to socialize your
Selecting your tools and partners benefits and drive support for your next cloud project. For your
cloud project to succeed, you must look beyond achieving
Cloud migration requires you to consider different kinds of
a successful implementation and instead look at how you
complexities. During implementation, applications might be
can drive cultural evolution by identifying better ways to
running in parallel and need to work with other applications
collaborate, perhaps by leveraging an analytics-driven
both in the cloud or on-premises. Applications from different
approach to making business decisions. Ultimately, as
cloud vendors will still need to be integrated to accommodate
Grant Thornton notes: “Competitive advantage will not be
cross functional workflows.
about which organizations can move their applications to the
Identifying platform technologies for integration, user access cloud the fastest and in the most cost-effective way, but rather
management, data aggregation, analytics, and reporting should which organizations understand that maximizing the cloud
be done in concurrence with your initial application selection. investment requires being effective at managing a constant
These essential technologies will help keep your business state of change.”
moving forward as applications are migrated and also provide
By making change orientation a key element of your
reporting and insights that will help improve decisions both in
organizational DNA, you can not only set up your project
the near term and on an ongoing basis.
for success, but you can also create a more agile organization
Choosing the right partners to help you design and implement that is better prepared to take on future challenges and
your cloud strategy is essential. Most businesses don’t have the opportunities. The future is in the cloud, but that path doesn’t
capacity or expertise to do it themselves. need to be cloudy.

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1 Pilot Flying J, case study
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