Cloud Solutions Value Realization

Whether or not to adopt the cloud is no longer the question as cloud services are now ubiquitous among organizations. However, with widespread adoption, some have been more successful than others at realizing the value of cloud services. There is a strong correlation between the implementation of best practices to value realization. Cloud services are now ubiquitous among enterprises large and small. Achieving the business case on which you based your decision to invest in new capabilities and the technology to enable them doesn’t happen automatically. The business case, your vision, and desired outcomes are key inputs to develop the strategy for your investment

A critical aspect of any customer success role is to help customers generate measurable value from the solutions they purchase. It's only by realizing value from a solution that a customer will want to renew or increase their existing service contracts or make additional purchases. Helping customers understand the value they are getting is precisely what being a CSM is all about, and the value-realization stage is a critical one, since it's during this stage that customers start to realize a return from their investment in the CSM's company's solutions.

To ensure that your project achieves more of the benefits and value outlined in your business case, you need a solid focus on value realization.

To extract the full business value of cloud technologies, organizations should adopt fundamentally new ways of working, shifting to new operating models and developing new roles and skills. Four key areas for companies to address include:

1. Business value focus: develop an optimal cloud strategy anchored to comprehensive economic business cases to identify revenue upside and cost efficiency opportunities while aligning goals and putting company leaders on the same page.
2. People and culture change management: implement new upskilling and talent readiness programs, along with new operating models, to help transform and enhance how people work so they can better meet rapidly changing needs.
3. Data and AI: unlock industry- and function-specific data insights and intelligence trapped in legacy systems with the power of cloud data models.
4. Partnering for success: leverage the skills and experience of strategic partners to expand and enhance the organization’s existing capabilities. Cloud-managed services are often an option for companies looking to access the right skills while maintaining cost efficiency.  

Organizations that create and disseminate migration roadmaps and business cases as early as possible in the cloud migration see, by far, the greatest success. When migration to cloud infrastructure is seen as an organization-wide transformation with broad buy-in and executive sponsorship, there is by far superior result. In addition, organization should improve specific areas of value. To achieve this, below some KPIs that represent success for each area of value. Rather than requiring broad-sweeping or structural changes to the organization, these are more tactical levers that organizations can pull.

1. Cost savings. Utilizing diverse pricing models - Implementation and utilization of workload-appropriate pricing models lead to greater cost savings. While integration is not necessary, close partnership and alignment between IT, finance, and lines of business (LOB) in cloud financial management practices like resource allocation, tagging, and cost allocation lead to a more efficient infrastructure bill.
2. Installing a centralized cloud team. As cloud infrastructure is implemented, typical restraints on scaling a business are removed. Organizations can now focus their attention on increasing speed to market and experimenting with new innovations. Of all value drivers, improvement in business agility is difficult to measure due to the diverse and unique nature of each organization and industry. Other best practices include providing cloud training and certification, documenting best practices and processes, and performing testing.
3.  Business agility. As cloud infrastructure is implemented, typical restraints on scaling a business are removed. Organizations can now focus their attention on increasing speed to market and experimenting with new innovations. Of all value drivers, improvement in business agility is difficult to measure due to the diverse and unique nature of each organization and industry. For business agility, the top best practices focus mainly on modern development methods. High maturity organizations have implemented widespread adoption of Agile and DevOps methodologies in their development and cloud-related teams.

While specific services, workloads, and instances need to be optimized, enterprises have the opportunity to realize greater value from cloud services by being focused and purposeful about cloud strategy and implementing best practices.

Customer success requires businesses to be proactive, agile, and responsive. With experienced customer success resources, it is possible to drive growth with proven processes. It is also necessary to note that the concept and notion of value will change over time. It is necessary to thus define what is perceived as a value from time to time. There should be communication between customers and companies over what is value.