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Platforms Don't Run Themselves

Ray Delany

Updated: May 25, 2022

Unfortunately, digital transformation isn’t just about getting into the Cloud. That may be an important part of the journey, but digital transformation is an ongoing process - it’s not a destination where you arrive.


Neither is the Cloud. Getting started in cloud computing is ridiculously easy as you can sign up in a heartbeat for just about any set of services you can imagine. It’s the equivalent of buying your vehicle so you can go on a road trip. The vehicle isn’t the outcome, it’s the experience of being on the road that you want.

Cloud computing platform

And just like a road vehicle, cloud services rarely deliver their full benefit when you start the engine. To really get the full benefits of cloud services you generally have to invest some time in properly configuring them.


Take Microsoft’s popular Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) service for example. It’s quick to subscribe and start using it because the default settings are designed to make the service easy to use. This means the defaults are a kind of lowest common denominator and you need to spend more time configuring security settings in-depth.


Cloud providers usually won’t go out of their way to make this obvious to you. In most cases, you have to dig around a bit to see what’s available. The better services have great onboarding videos and resources, but these also take a lot of your valuable time if you haven’t thought through what you want to achieve.


Many businesses choose to use a managed services provider to help them do this work, and if your company is big enough that can be a value-added service. For smaller businesses, doing it yourself is the viable option, but the trick is knowing what you need to do.


Just as with a road trip in your brand-new wheels, not having an idea of where you want to go or how to get there sets you up for a poor experience. It’s a surprisingly common situation in digital.


As with all tech capabilities, the benefits of cloud platforms are greatly magnified by having a clear strategy leading to the business outcomes you are wanting from them.


Sometimes, our underlying beliefs inhibit our decision-making process.


Recently, I had an experience with a potential customer who had visited our site and concluded that our services would be too expensive for her needs. Fortunately for both of us, she made contact anyway. In the first discussion we identified that we could save her business more in a single month than she would have paid us on our monthly subscription: That’s money invested in CIO Studio returned almost immediately or if you want to be quantitative, a 10000% return on investment.


We can’t promise that kind of return every time, but we are pretty confident that our services are worth it!


Why not find out for yourself what might be possible? Book a meeting with us and see how we can help your organisation.


Ray Delany is the Founder of CIO Studio, a company built to partner with SMEs and help them solve the “strategy” problem and align their digital investment with their business outcomes.

 

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