Defining a cloud-native future state is crucial to achieving sustainable success

The Great Hurry is catching out companies as they rush to implement cloud technologies to enable speed and agility without first defining their purpose and desired outcomes. The result can be modern front-end solutions tied to legacy back-end systems and a mishmash of data and integration headaches.

HFS CEO and Chief Analyst Phil Fersht identified that the great hurry impacts as many as 50% of companies as they move even faster on their planned investments. Zensar SVP and Global Lead Cloud and Data Engineering, Rajat Sharma, says an HFS OneOffice™ mindset and clear direction are essential for “velocity”—the outcome of speed in the right direction.

Success requires developing systems and software that deliver valuable insights employees need

Plotting a successful course to become cloud-native starts with harnessing your employees’ need to access the right information to do their job most effectively. To improve employees’ effectiveness, use familiar technology to build the tools they need and provide better customer visibility.

Adopting technologies that promise to change operations can often tie up scarce resources. Moreover, their efforts may go to waste if they do not know what success looks like for their firm’s leadership, employees, or customers. HFS and Zensar agree that application modernization efforts may come up short if teams only pursue a firm’s target state objective and don’t fully consider all aspects of the firm’s intended future state of operations and information provisioning.

While a target state gives way to a future state via an iterative process, too often companies get lost in these. Rather, a future state vision should anticipate that the experiences your employees and customers seek when interacting with your organization must continue to evolve as circumstances change. Thus, a future state must be adaptable and allow data, workflows, and applications to be more composable compared to the rigid frameworks in use today. This will separate the need to iterate process flow from being hardcoded to applications.

To develop a future state plan, your business and technology teams must work together to assess their current understanding of the market’s, competitors’, and suppliers’ impact on the customer’s experience. Then you can plot a future state, including getting the data input from your back-end and front-end systems to improve the flow and responsiveness needed in delivering data and solutions contextualized in a consumable manner.

Achieving the OneOffice™ is a desirable future state for most firms

The OneOffice mindset is HFS’ vision for actionable digital and operational transformation. At its heart is the concept that emerging technologies combine with people, processes, and data to dissolve barriers between the front and back office to create the only office that matters. The OneOffice is a crucial part of the cloud-native journey in connecting the business, systems, and technologies to personalized outcomes.

 Exhibit 1: A OneOffice mindset must inform your firm’s future state

Source: HFS Research, 2022

The OneOffice view in Exhibit 1 clarifies that modernization efforts impact experiences. With this mindset, technology and business leaders can more effectively select which process change, automation, and data are critical for sustainable development, deployment, management, and support of business and customer-based outcomes. The result is realizing an adaptable future state where data, applications, and processes combine to deliver the best possible end-user outcomes and make hyper-personalization of both EX and CX possible.

Zensar is incorporating aspects of HFS’s OneOffice to create a complementary framework illustrated in Exhibit 2 for its customers. The go-to-market framework is based on understanding a firm’s domain and expectations of its customers, the experiences of its employees in delivering, and how technology and data lead to better decisions.

Exhibit 2: Zensar’s domain-driven, experience-led engineering approach to creating products

Source: Zensar, 2022

Four steps to achieve OneOffice velocity in the cloud

Velocity is speed plus direction. To achieve velocity, the CTO’s team must develop reusable components and frameworks to re-architect applications as functional components with exposed integration points, allowing for more agile creation and consumption of data-driven outputs.

• Begin by re-architecting your technology capabilities as a multi-cloud-centric reference architecture, recognizing that today’s solutions must adapt, and change is inevitable.
• Transform your applications and data into reusable, accessible, and secure components. Don’t just choose the fast way of moving some systems into the cloud and drastically changing others. Instead, partner with a firm and your business leaders to develop a domain-centric future-state view of what processes, workloads, and data you will need—design for that.
• Invest in organizing how you deliver data in the context of the customer consuming the services or products you are known for. Forget making these efficient and average; recognize that today’s buyers expect personalized experiences when voting with their wallets.
• Adopt a platform that observes, manages, and governs in a cloud-native framework. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor, report, and augment staff, from business analysts to front-line employees, will empower without restricting the agility that leads to becoming cloud native.

Zensar fused HFS’ views with its own to create the “next-gen modular Velocity Stack” in Exhibit 3 with four layers of artifacts and accelerators to help CTOs, CDOs, and CIOs enable each of the four steps for achieving OneOffice velocity for a cloud-native enterprise.

Exhibit 3: Zensar’s velocity stack: Comprehensive accelerators for high-velocity delivery

Source: Zensar, 2022

Achieving success from a customer’s perspective

Zensar’s customer, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, is a UK-based professional body for surveyors, founded in London in 1868. It works at a cross-governmental level and aims to promote and enforce international standards in the valuation, management, and development of land, real estate, construction, and infrastructure. The RICS needed to overcome its complex technology architecture and application environment resulting from years of internal growth and the acquisition of other firms.

The firm is achieving a future operating state by decommissioning a mishmash of existing mainframe-based systems. Its effort is to reduce seven systems to a single target system, including a new API, applications, and data structures. In addition, it plans to move to a cloud-centric API and fully replace its on-premises IBM mainframes to create a new system for the firm and its ecosystems.

With little appetite for replacing IBM DB2 and related architecture, Zensar had to work closely with the CIO’s office to outline a business plan to explain how its modernization efforts would be low risk to the client. In addition, with talent constraints, Zensar must help the client use its existing resources and balance the needs and capabilities of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and Zensar.

“Zensar enables me to see the road ahead and develop a compelling hybrid strategy that met the needs of my technology teams and the risk-averse business leaders,” explained former CIO Adrian Connor. “My future state is one unified system in my data center and everything else in the cloud.”

Zensar’s CRUX methodology helped the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors overcome its tactical applications, servers, and databases that needed more than a target state of migration or decommission and rather a state of what functionality needs to be ported and to where (cloud or on-premises).

Zensar coordinated with Aiden to meet his team’s needs, and it adapted its skills to align better with Aiden’s needs. While Zensar hoped for a “big bang” approach, it was willing to start by developing a long-term approach to developing mutual trust and solutions. Then, the firm could develop suitable delivery models and become a trusted advisor for current and future programs.

Zensar realigned its services to become a partner for enterprise transformation, using the OneOffice mindset to deliver measurable change

Zensar is changing its model to be a better partner by focusing on who it serves, where it can best serve them, and what services they need from the partner to reach a cloud-first future state of operations. While this may limit its overall market opportunity, this formidable competitor can focus on delivering value based on core capabilities in domain and technologies.

It simplified how customers engage with them by focusing on fewer industries, markets, and services. In addition, customers choose from discrete services rather than an extensive catalog. Both parties can frame their joint efforts more effectively by focusing on coverage and capabilities. Sometimes choosing from less is worth more.

Exhibit 4: Focus brings value to interactions by delivering a focused approach to the industry, services, and geographic scales

Source: Zensar, 2022

The Bottom Line: It’s easy to invest a lot of money and time into digitally transforming your firm to operate in the cloud. Many firms have valued speed of transformation over sustainable value and are now paying the price.

By adding business context and outcomes as the direction your firm travels on its cloud-native journey, the changes your firm invests in become more meaningful to the experience desired by employees and customers. In addition, by making OneOffice a core part of its velocity (the speed and purpose to which it measures the success of this journey), your firm and its technical services partners can trust this journey will also meet the expectations and desires of meaningful business outcomes.