How ‘bout that Masters? Charl Schwartzel. Who would’ve guessed? Similar to trying to guess where all this “cloud” stuff is going.

San Francisco. We are at a hi-tech company that first embraced the cloud in 2003. Yes, that’s right, 2003. Back then, the term “Cloud” did not exist—popular parlance was  “On-Demand”—and this particular company took a leap of faith and rolled out a system to  500 + customer support agents, whose primary responsibility was to respond to inquiries from channel partners.
    
Fast forward to April 2011.

Not much has changed. While the initial deployment was a success, this organization is stuck in place with the “Cloud.” Why? Because, quite simply,  they remain married to legacy technology and legacy process. While the 2003 project was targeted at a centralized process and a centralized organization, their future cloud projects are targeted at global, decentralized, sales and operations processes, all of which have been hardwired with on-premise software and process, and local culture. Not so easy to change.

We are here to discuss plans for how this company should move forward with their Cloud ambitions. And, like many of these conversations,  we are focused on how best to align a corporate vision and strategy with a method to execute, iterative process, and technology change into their business. There are several tracks that we have identified as candidates for Cloud initiatives: Lead to Order, Partner Enablement, Lead Registration, and Major Accounts management. Absent from our conversation, in particular, is any discussion regarding some of the hotter topics in the cloud, including Social Media and Mobile.

For this company—although they embraced the Cloud in 2003—the thought of planning initiatives in the hyped categories of Social Media and Mobile are on the far horizon, given that there are more pressing process opportunities to conquer, including such important topics as:

• Deploying processes to better allocate MDF funds to partners, based on partner rankings (a significant portion of this organization sells through the channel)
• Developing a common pricing model across global regions
• Measuring account penetration across product lines, using data both from the channel and direct sales
• Building and deploying a common global sales process, enabling enhanced forecasting at the corporate level
• Centralizing “repeat” orders, taking this workload off of the sales organization, thus better allocating high price resources into market share generating activities.

These were but a few of the topics that we discussed.  As you can see, each one represents process change that Cloud technologies, on their own, cannot solve.  Rather, these changes will require building consensus across their global organization, and will require an agile method to execute these changes, supported by flexible cloud technologies.
    
The key, in our humble opinion, is for this organization to begin to rationalize their corporate vision with smaller, incremental Cloud initiatives that can begin to build momentum towards the eventual eradication of legacy process and technology.  It won’t happen overnight, but by focusing on the business issues, and ignoring the hype, there will be a path to success.
    
Next stop?  Boston.