Cultural and people barriers are hindering the success of implementing cloud adoption across the public sector. This was revealed in white paper commissioned by Brightman. It is aimed at CIOs and other leadership roles within public sector organisations who want to avoid the common challenges of moving to the cloud.
Since the government introduced the “Cloud First” policy for public sector IT in 2013, public sector organisations have undertaken major IT transformation projects to shift workloads to the Cloud.
According to McKinsey, 70% of all IT transformation projects fail, and among those that do not take a holistic approach to change (i.e. do not implement business change to support the IT change), the success rate is only 10%.
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The aim of the white paper, according to Brightman, is to educate public sector leaders on the people and cultural challenges they will inevitably face in their Cloud transformation projects, and to suggest solutions to mitigate them.
“Sadly, many thousands or even millions of pounds is wasted on failed IT projects every year because the human element was not fully considered from the outset. The delivery of cloud is not an IT project but a transformation; cultural and people change activities must take place in parallel with the technical change activities. Moving to the cloud – or introducing any other major IT change for that matter – fundamentally changes the work environment,” said Brightman co-founder, Romy Hughes.
“This is challenging for staff and IT managers alike, so it will naturally be met with resistance. This resistance needs to be actively managed as part of the transformation plan.”
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The research suggested that any cloud transformation plan must incorporate four aspects; process, organisation, technology and information. Only when this happens can an organisation achieve its cloud benefits, meet its strategic aims and gain the Return on Investment (ROI) that it expects.
The paper also highlighted the additional risks that can result when users do not support a new IT initiative, such as the creeping of Shadow IT and the persistence of proprietary IT systems.
“A move to Cloud is not an IT project, it is a transformation, and to not treat it as such is fraught with peril,” concluded Hughes.
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