The Importance of Business Change Champions: Are People Really the Secret to Successful Cloud Adoption?

We’ve come to the conclusion that people drive change at an organisational level, not the technology that they chose to deploy. Success in the cloud is governed by a careful curation of skill, experience and ethos.

We’ve been talking to some of our clients about the process of cloud transformation- more specifically, how to implement a culture of positive change. Of course, great change management won’t be the only reason for the success of your cloud migration, but without the right combination of business transformation champions and leaders, the uptake of your new digital environment is at risk of failure.

Achieving genuine workforce engagement is one of the single biggest challenges to digital transformation, the reality is humans don’t like change and they definitely don’t like leaving their comfort zone. When it comes to technology resistance, research suggesets that there’s the added fear of increased automation and the subsequent replacement of human jobs.

Undoubtedly, when these kind of situations arise, having individuals with strong knowledge of legacy systems will help to bridge that gap between the old and new ways of working. Legacy skills are an essential component of thorough onboarding- helping to make new processes less daunting.

On a wider scale, companies can often neglect to address rewriting company culture, instead focusing on recruiting young digitally savvy talent. Doing this will only seek to ostracise other areas of the company, instead, the company ethos as a whole needs to evolve- becoming a digitally driven, data centric workforce who prides themselves on being future focused.

What we’re trying to say is that for many organisations, the lack of digital uptake can be linked back to a lack of company wide contribution, it would be a mistake to believe you could implement change from one dedicated task force and expect a transformation to ripple out.

So once you’ve built your company culture- a place that supports new ways of working and positive change- it’s still vital to have skilled individuals who will support the vision you have for a digital future. As we continue to move away from legacy on prem systems, experience in cloud transformations continues to grow but that experience can still be hard to come by.

Despite the difficulty in finding experienced digital change leaders, they are an essential tool in communicating to both stakeholders and the wider business the direction that your company is headed in.

When recruiting, even at C-suite level, it’s incredibly important to have adaptable staff who understand the power of being data led and are happy to make bold metrics driven decisions. It’s important to mention here that most organisations use learning and onboarding tools to ensure upskilling is both provided for and tracked. At Konsolute our Virtual Academy and Intranet solutions are great for assisting in the cut over process.

This combination of skilled individuals spread out throughout the business providing a blanket approach to transformation will avoid the dangers of top-down hierarchy or a siloed technical team. Essentially, the feeling of a bigger movement within your organisation in conjunction with a deep rooted change in ethos will likely sweep up even the most reluctant of employees.