3 Reasons Why Your CCoE May Fail

Post • 3 min read

When you reach a certain stage of cloud adoption, you set up your Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE). There are noble intentions – to maintain best-practice guardrails that make it easier for the organisation to drive innovation and run more and more production workloads in the cloud .

But too often, a CCoE fails to deliver the intended return on investment (ROI). This leads to frustration all around. CCoE managers are banging their heads against the desk, feeling stymied despite their best efforts. And business units get cloud scepticism because they’re not getting the anticipated value and they’re dealing with new toil without gaining the much-vaunted benefits.

Let’s look at 3 reasons why you find yourself in a situation where you need to improve the CCoE’s ROI and ability to drive value in the business.

Reason #1: The CCoE is more policeman than fitness trainer

Essentially, the problem is that the CCoE’s focus has been derailed. The cloud’s value to customers comes from running production workloads in the cloud. The CCoE should be enabling this, helping boost the organisation’s overall cloud fitness. Instead, it’s become a design authority.

CCoE managers get so deep in the tech space that they become the infra guys who tell people how to use the cloud, when they should be building production capabilities and supporting innovation. Therefore, the CCoE is often seen as a bottleneck rather than a change enabler or innovation hub.

Reason #2: It focuses on bums on seats rather than automation

As cloud adoption increases, the standard practice is to add more people to the CCoE. As a result, CCoE managers get pigeon-holed as “people who provision things” instead of people who foster automation.

The CCoE gets so caught up in these day-to-day infra tasks that there are missed opportunities to use automation for planning, provisioning and management. And automation is why the cloud exists, so the less seats you need the more you are successful with your ability to foster ROI with the CCoE.

Reason #3: It doesn’t get round to making itself obsolete

Having a CCoE is an essential step of the cloud journey, but the name is misleading. The point of cloud isn’t actually to centralise it in the organisation – it’s to embed it at the edge. This means CCoEs should never be permanent fixtures. Their ultimate remit is to remove themselves from processes because cloud practices become part of business as usual (BAU).

Often, CCoEs get so caught up in the police work and provisioning that there’s no time or headspace to plan for making itself obsolete. This becomes a vicious circle because the business’ perception is then that the CCoE is focused on that police work and provisioning.

This means it’s not given a seat at the table for the strategic business, product and market planning that would enable it to plan that transition to BAU.

Is there a solution? 

Yes.

Does it involve waving a magic wand? No.

But is it better to just bury your head in the sand? Definitely not.

The solution involves implementing new processes and automating as much as possible. To give you an idea, not only have we helped global enterprises solve these 3 problems and improve CCoE ROI, but we’ve committed to helping make their CCoE obsolete in 2 years.

With the right model, the right people and the right tools, you too can overcome perceived CCoE stagnation and empower CCoE teams to drive real value.

Whenever you are ready to build a CCoE that drives value, Nordcloud can help you along the way. 

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Ilja Summala
Ilja Summala LinkedIn
CTO
Ilja’s passion and tech knowledge help customers transform how they manage infrastructure and develop apps in cloud.