Mindset shifts to transform business applications for the cloud

4 min read
Aug 3, 2022 4:00:00 PM

Despite having a digital transformation and cloud strategy, the majority of businesses have not fully updated their application landscape or taken advantage of cloud-native architectures. By transferring workloads and storage requirements to the cloud, the IT department has started to make use of the technological architecture of top cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Running the same apps on a cloud infrastructure does not provide any business value; instead, it primarily yields IT advantages by utilizing economies of scale.

Businesses must reevaluate their whole application landscape and technological stack to fully exploit the possibilities of cloud transformation. Starting with recognizing the significant contrasts between current on-premises operations and cloud environments, entails letting go of ingrained fundamental values, cognitive habits, and architectural principles.

What is a Cloud Mindset?

Your mindset is a collection of your attitudes and methods of thinking. While there is no right or wrong thinking, certain mindsets are noticeably more favorable than others in a given situation.

Consider a top-notch engineer who has earned a reputation for successfully resolving challenging issues on their own. The engineer's excellent individual contributor attitude has allowed him to succeed and make a difference for the company. It can be tempting for the engineer to maintain the same perspective and deal with the issues his team is presently facing when he is promoted to manager. He and his team won't be able to achieve long-term success with such an attitude. He will need to adopt a manager's perspective, where his main goal is to support the team in becoming more adept at problem-solving on their own.

A cloud mindset has two key components:

  1. The readiness to reconsider technology's function and how the organization might use it to its advantage and achieve its goals.
  2. The readiness to reevaluate the value offered across the business, taking into account the areas where people, processes, and culture need to be aligned to provide value more effectively and efficiently.

Rethinking Work

A cloud perspective enables labor to be rethought as data transformation and stewardship, much like rigid architecture may be rethought as code. Several instances of this include: making a document, observing a network, and establishing permissions, configuring a tenant, gathering payment information to conduct a transaction securely, sending an email, and creating a structure using plans, talking with a coworker at work.

Deliver the appropriate data at the appropriate time, with the appropriate interface, to the worker, other people, and automated systems so they may use it. Thinking in this way can assist the company in identifying assets, openings, and obstacles that can be overcome to increase output, cut costs, and perhaps even improve the quality of work.

Learning in a Cloud-First World

As management and staff alike embrace a cloud perspective, our demands for how we learn new skills and approach change - for IT specialists and users - are also changing in the cloud.

  • Agile learning must follow agile working

The agile manner of working emphasizes the users' more independent, iterative, and collaborative working style. It is also applicable to education and training. Employees need to pursue their progress more freely in an agile cloud-based environment. They make less formal and more demand-driven decisions about what, when, and how they learn. Exploratory, cooperative, and iterative learning processes emerge. Classrooms and guided learning won't be supplanted, but formats like learning circles, hackathons, and bar camps will make them better.

  • To stay up with the cloud, you must constantly learn new things

Employees want a straightforward, clear, and efficient approach to stay current when the products they use daily are updated often. The SAP keeps the current program and provides a solution to the issue. SAP specialists may refresh their knowledge in a detailed way and learn about the newest capabilities of solutions like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, or SAP Ariba solutions based on their job and current experience. Through SAP Learning Hub, new training materials, like videos and quizzes, are made accessible for the introduction of SAP Cloud products. The application gives customers a quicker and more frequent means to update and maintain the validity of their SAP Certifications.

  • As a working experience, learning

The learning experience has become essential for user acceptance in addition to the information itself. Learning resources must be adaptable and user-friendly. Training must in a cloud world adapt to the user and the corresponding working setting, whether users are studying on their own time and device or at the precise moment of need within the program itself. Employees may learn the ins and outs of an application as they are using it, wherever they are, thanks to the SAP Companion service, which is one approach to facilitate this. All educational resources are made available through SAP Enable Now and are subject to revision and updating by business knowledge specialists.

Developing a Cloud Mindset Is a Cultural Shift

When it comes to how people handle difficult events in life, mindset is crucial. It is the outcome of our ideals and attitudes. And since we are always learning and unlearning behaviors, they in turn are frequently molded by prior conditioning and outside influences. Therefore, effective change management does not seek to alter people's perspectives individually. Instead, it concentrates on changing the culture that creates these views.

Companies may set the stage for a successful shift with the help of experts in organizational culture, change, and transformation, for instance. Environments must be developed where learning and using new mental models are equally crucial as undoing the learning of outdated ones that no longer serve us.

All business areas are affected by cloud transformation. To fully realize the advantages of the cloud at an enterprise scale, entails updating and synchronizing old systems as well as harmonizing organizational structure, processes, people, culture, and leadership. The effort is worthwhile even if this is not as simple as configuring a tenant. Adopting a cloud mindset is the first step in a successful cloud transformation, followed by assisting in the alignment of the other components.

Do you want to know more about controlling the changes brought on by cloud transformation? Start altering your path and mentality to the cloud by getting in touch with TransformHub right away.