So, you’re moving to the cloud. There are a lot of reasons to do so, right? You can do lots of new things. You can do those things fast. It costs a lot less. You can outsource it. We will never need to wait for a server again. Everyone is doing it!
Regardless of your reasons, to be successful with your move, you will need to clarify a few things. We are talking about taking a journey that will transform your business – a journey that demands a real, measurable business purpose. And to take such a journey, you need organizational leadership commitment. I liken this journey to winding your way through a deep, dark jungle. Before stepping into the jungle, the smart people (we call them survivors) take a map and a compass, the proper tools and equipment, plenty of resources and supplies, and experts to guide them. They envision the journey before they take a step.
I’ll share a little personal “wisdom” learned from our cloud experience. I work at a healthcare technology company. And like many companies who consider moving to the cloud, we have compelling reasons to make the jump. While IT costs and capital buys, modernization, and platform services are real considerations, the main reason for us to move to the cloud is the iceberg.
Consider the Iceberg. Despite its most impressive stature, about 90% of an iceberg is below the water where you can’t see it. Which means you only see 10% of its glory shimmering above the water. Now consider your IT enterprise as being an iceberg. Where does it spend its time? Is that time spent below the water where no one can see the results? Is the team constantly patching, upgrading, escalating, fixing, revamping, managing, and remediating IT assets – all day long? How much time does that give them to accomplish the above-the-water things that people can see? Things like features, advancements, innovations, let alone industry revolutions. It’s fine for a lurking, destructive iceberg to stay below the water, but it’s devastating for an IT company to do so. And trust me, we are all IT companies, regardless of which industry we are a part of.
Healthcare tech, in particular, is accelerating. The pandemic accelerated innovation seemingly overnight: how we communicate and share information, our data, our systems, and processes were quickly put to the test. Legislation also pushed to improve health information exchange for patients, providers, and payers for better care coordination and efficiency. Moving to the cloud allows us to achieve the pace necessary to innovate.
At NantHealth, we said it’s time to flip the model. Let’s spend our time above the water and figure out how to spend a lot more time supporting our customers. We envisioned that the cloud would allow us to use its infrastructure and platform services instead of building our own. The cloud would eliminate the time-consuming management of those assets, which would enable our teams to build quality things quickly, and with agility, such as our Eviti and NaviNet solutions – which are rapidly introducing new capabilities to respond to the changing healthcare landscape. The cloud would provide us with a lever to produce what our customers want at improved costs, quality, and speed.
And that became the mission statement. It was important to write down that mission and to shout it from the company mountain tops. To be clear, the shift to the cloud is transformational, and transformational shifts imply shifts in company culture, and those shifts require a push from leadership. Great leaders throughout history have communicated a vision and have led the way to accomplish it. If you look around and don’t see executive leadership behind your cloud move, you should reconsider. There will be bumps along the road, and without a firm mission and the push from the top, you can end up lost in the jungle.
Stay tuned for part two, where I will discuss actions you can take to get started on your cloud transformation.