"Why are we doing this?!"

It is possibly the most common phrase uttered by teams experiencing organizational change. And unfortunately, so.

If teams ask this question, their leadership team clearly skipped an essential step in the change process: Establishing a Shared Purpose.

Even when it's done right, organizational change is a challenge. Digital Transformation is no exception. Most fail to achieve their original objectives, with reported failure rates ranging from 70% to 95%.

Change is hard. Many companies attempting to change end up making it worse by skipping steps.

It's much harder to recover (and successfully implement change) following a false start than to do it right the first time. This is why we insist that every client take this essential first step with every engagement, including embarking on a cloud adoption journey or application modernization program.

What does this essential first step look like exactly?

1. Leaders align on goals.

2. Goals get translated into success metrics.

3. Teams receive communicated decisions with a rationale.

You might be thinking, "this seems obvious."

But in our experience, asking five leaders within the same company, "why are you doing X?" almost always produces five different answers.

We can appreciate how this happens. There are many reasons why leaders of a company would want to adopt the cloud:

• Competitive advantage

  The business leader and shareholders may be concerned with gaining a competitive advantage over rivals by improving their agility, innovation, and time-to-market.

• Scalability

  The infrastructure leader may be concerned with quickly scaling their infrastructure up or down to support fluctuating workloads, peak traffic demands, or rapid growth.

• Enhanced security

  A security leader may be concerned with protecting sensitive data and ensuring compliance with regulations. Cloud providers have robust baseline security measures and provide enhanced security capability at a fraction of the cost compared to on-prem.

• Cost savings

  The budget owner wants to reduce costs to do more with less. Companies no longer need to over-provision to handle peak usage and 'what-if' scenarios.

The benefits are apparent.

It's too easy for various leaders to agree on the cloud in general terms but unknowingly have different ideas for the company's future state in the cloud in specific terms.

It's just as easy for those vaguely defined modernization projects to fail for the same reason.

False starts are costly.

One report from 2021 estimated that major enterprises sunk an average of $5.5M on subsequently failed digital transformations. Another study from 2019 reported that $900 billion out of $1.3 trillion invested in digital transformation in 2018 went to waste.

Worse yet, a lack of direction is a missed opportunity to inspire and mobilize teams - a different but equally problematic cost on top of the baseline complexity.

Change of any kind is hard on teams. It becomes much harder for them to get on board when they feel confused or apathetic toward the transformation initiative.

Teams only have so much attention span. If they need to learn or understand the rationale behind the change, it will be easy for them to spend their attention elsewhere.

The good news is that this troublesome situation is entirely avoidable.

A Shared Purpose simplifies deciding exactly how your company will leverage cloud technology.

Everyone has the same answer to the "why are we doing this?" question to guide every "how should we do this?" decision. Every decision will align with the same answer, and the value of that established purpose will compound over time.

Knowing *why * creates clarity, which allows for autonomy and increased efficiency.

A company can improve their business by adopting the cloud in many ways. And every stakeholder's primary motivation for your company's cloud adoption should be expressed and considered as the first step in your journey.

The cloud offers a world of possibilities worth pursuing. But in this case, many positives can make a negative: complexity.

This is where an experienced partner comes in handy.

Over the last 20 years, our team at Build with Assembly has empowered enterprise titans to thrive in a digital world by modernizing the applications and infrastructure holding them back.

We're familiar with all the possibilities the cloud can offer.

We've seen first-hand all the awesome outcomes cloud adoption can achieve.

As a result, we know how to simplify your cloud adoption journey.

It all begins with a Shared Purpose.