Unlocking Human Potential Through Cloud

Capturing value from cloud investments - to accelerate digital transformation - is not just a technology challenge, but a people opportunity.

The past few years accelerated a profound change in how public sector organizations connect with Canadians. Regardless of the size and scope of the department or agency, almost overnight, public sector leaders had to find a way to continue to deliver products and services in a contactless way. Transformation was necessary to survive the challenges introduced and accelerated by the global pandemic, and a key enabling factor for many organizations was accelerating their migration to the cloud.

In the latest blog in our blog series – Maximizing the Business Value of Cloud Computing we noted that cloud value leaders, those achieving greater value from cloud computing relative to others, look beyond cost savings and understand that the cloud is a launchpad for innovation that will drive cultural change through new ways of working. These cloud leaders are not only transforming their organizations, increasing speed-to-delivery, and improving customer experience, but they are also realizing greater cost savings, on average. In other words, the value proposition for cloud computing is very compelling to all, especially when it is business led and approached strategically.

Recent Accenture research clearly indicates that there are significant gains to be made by investing in cloud technology and people. Cloud leaders who transformed both people and technology in support of their cloud strategy achieved on average 60% greater value from their investments compared to their peers. People are not only a key enabler, but the multiplier for cloud value, influencing the speed, agility, risk, efficacy, and cost of cloud-based transformations.

In stark contrast to these findings, a lack of investment in ‘people transformation’ negatively affects business metrics such as reduced levels of cost savings, slower migration, and reduced agility. 54% of CEOs identified skills shortages as the top barrier to achieving client value.

Cloud value leaders understand that capturing value from cloud investments - to accelerate digital transformation - is not just a technology challenge, but a people opportunity. They recognize that driving transformation requires the right skills and talent and that skill building can reduce the risk of being left behind, especially in a market where cloud skills are in high demand. Cloud leaders continuously invest in people and align their cloud strategy to business outcomes, unlocking greater human potential and cloud value than their peers.

The People Challenge: Unlocking Human Potential

Cloud technology and people can easily get out of sync. Clients often migrate their technology to the cloud and leave their people “on premise”. This reinforces organizational silos, as organizations continue with waterfall processes and hierarchical decision making. In addition, fixed mindsets restrict innovation and digital and cloud fluency is not promoted, which leads to organizations falling further behind the curve. It is easy to see why migrating technology to the cloud, without transitioning people, might not yield the expected speed, agility, and cost savings.

Migrate Technology & Cloud Skills and Talent

Within many large organizations, people and teams function a lot like technology systems. Just as you can engineer technology to drive a particular outcome, you can engineer human systems to work at cloud speed, with agility and innovation. It’s about creating processes, infrastructure, and the right environment for your upskilled workforce and teams to thrive in the cloud.

Research suggests that 40% of skills will change in the next 5 years, and that ~50% of all employees will need reskilling in some form. With that in mind, it’s not only critical to have a clear view of the specific skill gaps at the team and functional level, but also the skills ontology (which looks at the relationships between skills) so organizations can create a common language and understanding of skills, and target which skills and capabilities they need to build, and how.

Three Proven Actions to Transform Cloud Skills and Talent

1. Architect the Cloud Journey and Operating Model for Alignment

The way people and teams work together to drive cloud outcomes is—or should be—thoughtfully architected by leadership with employee input off the bat, to help build awareness and understanding. When organizations migrate to the cloud, the operating model needs to be re-architected for the new outcomes that cloud can enable and the new ways of working it can inspire. There are several cloud operating model “blueprints” that are optimized for different results. For example, if speed is a primary objective for the cloud transformation, a first step may be removing silos and integrating business and IT product teams to eliminate hand-offs and distributed accountability.

Once there is a cross-functional team in place, the next step is to increase their decision-making authority, by providing them with clear guidelines and access to necessary data, so they are not slowed down with unnecessary leadership reviews.

In addition, even when you integrate product teams, you need to make sure you have the right cloud skills and super skills (soft skills) in place, to execute the work and translate back to the business the outcomes and challenges.

2. Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) of Cloud Skills and Talent

The cloud skills gap can be enormous. There is a plethora of cloud native, cloud adjacent, and emerging technology skills, that change frequently. Few public sector organizations will be able to hire cloud workers at scale because everyone is vying for the same scarce digital talent.

And even if a department or agency could hire its way out of this problem (at a significant financial cost that is 6x greater than upskilling), there is a good chance that those skills would be obsolete by the time the new hires finished their orientation. A better strategy is continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) of cloud skills and talent.

Recent research indicates that, when compared with their peers, cloud value leaders are considerably more likely to re-skill existing employees to address the skill gaps. In fact, they are 4.6x more likely to build the skills necessary to transform into a cloud-enabled organization. However, developing future-focused technical skills among the workforce is not a one and done situation, and education needs to extend to all levels of the organization, including the C-suite. Building digital and cloud fluency must be an ongoing process that involves continually assessing workforce skills and providing people with continuous skills development opportunities and clearly mapped out career pathways - a lack of which has been a driving force behind high rates of attrition.

It is essential to fortify the department or agency’s own workforce to power cloud acceleration, and targeted cloud training for nontechnical people is a great way to help individuals understand how their function should adapt to the speed and flexibility of the cloud. This enables external hiring to be selective and strategically focused, introducing fresh perspectives, and modelling new innovative skills that will help reskill and upskill the workforce.

3. Build a Sustainable Infrastructure of Cloud-native Practices

Adoption goes far beyond the use of cloud technology, and cloud value leaders work hard to change their enterprise behaviours and culture to be more agile and innovative. They embrace new mindsets, behaviours, and ways of working to navigate complex scenarios and gather technical requirements which can be used to build digital fluency across the business and realize cloud value. This means using core digital technologies to:

·      Make decisions faster by empowering teams to make more of their own decisions when they have clear priorities, guidelines, and access to data.

·      Be more adaptable by having the technology, environment and policies that allow staff to work in a location that best suits the type of work he/she/they are performing.

·      Collaborate more easily by enabling more cross-collaboration and by building communities that can pinpoint the key issues that will unlock value.

·      Experiment more and innovate faster by building the willingness and resilience to try new things, by actively learning from experiences, and by making changes to processes and ways of working.

A cloud-skilled workforce is the engine for navigating the future with resiliency. Public sector organizations must continuously invest in their people to build a digital workforce and prepare for unprecedented change and for effective expansion at scale. Investing in people now, and upskilling to build a strong cloud capability, will prepare the organization for the next wave of technology breakthroughs and protect it against future disruption.

Accenture’s approach to learning is to put the learner at the centre of a learning ecosystem. For example, we believe we are all digital learners, so our ~700,000 employees can access formal training, through onboarding sessions, practice specific training, and vendor certifications. We also recognize the importance of learning from others, so we establish communities of practice, social communities, and have formal coaching and mentoring programs. As grandma used to say, ‘how do you know you can’t do it, if you haven’t even tried it?’ Well, this saying has stood the test of time for many aspects of change - we learn the ‘how’ through applying new ways of working. Not everyone learns at the same pace, so self-paced learning, boot camps, and virtual and augmented reality all play a role in individual upskilling journeys. This is all made possible because as a company we are almost entirely on the cloud, and we can pursue digital learning at times that are convenient for each of us, and in a contactless way.

To take full advantage of the cloud, public sector leaders must acquire and develop talent, fostering the skills needed to accelerate transformation and improve customer experience. They must empower their people with the right technology, tools, and skills to make smarter, faster decisions. They must ‘create moments of truth’ and tear down the siloes that hinder collaboration, and actively encourage and celebrate collaboration and experimentation across cloud enabled functions. This should no longer be seen as ‘voluntary training’ focused on network developers and cloud engineers, but a program everyone can engage with. And while people will drive the cloud agenda, these journeys must be underpinned by a vision, strategy, roadmap, and operating model that is tied to business goals and outcomes.