Article

How the cloud can help businesses go digital

Publication date
June 14, 2021

Technology is now omnipresent in work environments and it is growing at an exponential pace. This reality now makes business lines depend on IT teams like never before, resulting in a certain organizational complexity. However, the cloud can facilitate a company’s drive to innovate by improving the relationship between IT and business teams.

Business and IT: a partnership under pressure

The rate of technological progress has upended the strategic and organizational decision-making process for many companies. In fact, they must now break down the historical barriers between business and IT departments and mobilize them to face the same challenges. Here are 3 examples.

  1. A plethora of strategic options and the availability of expertise
    The digital revolution raises many questions about how a company should position itself. What solutions should it choose? Which should it prioritize? How can it maintain them? Do they have the resources and expertise necessary to deploy them?Amid this constant upheaval, business leaders and IT managers may have differing expectations. The former might focus on the solution’s features and ROI. The latter for their part are interested in the solution’s robustness, performance, and security and how easy it is to integrate into an existing infrastructure. The human resources aspect is also a crucial one, especially in this context of specialization and labour shortage.
  2. Frustration surrounding developmental delays/integration
    The acceleration of innovative technology is also shining a light on the frictions between business leaders and their IT counterparts when it comes to the lengthy deployment of technological projects. The notion of time is not the same for each party. The dilemma boils down to the following: business leaders want to take advantage of a new tool as quickly as possible while the IT teams know that developing and integrating a new solution requires planning that may take several months.
  3. Redefining the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed)
    The final organizational challenge is about the new roles and responsibilities related to technological tools. Who is accountable for the solution? Who is in charge of maintaining it? As the final users, business teams are involved now more than ever in the deployment of these solutions. Who are the experts who will be involved in the test phase? Will the business department be able to allocate resources to test future updates?
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The cloud can make the organizational model more agile

Thanks to its intrinsic nature, the cloud is a mode of delivery that can satisfy the needs of both business and IT teams. It facilitates responsiveness and promotes consensus. How?

  • The cloud helps a company overcome challenges related to human and material resources
    Adopting the cloud, especially when it is supported by managed services, means solving numerous tricky issues with an external solution. It can help the company’s infrastructure capacity adapt to the organization’s needs. It can also provide access to ultra-specialized IT experts when needed. The cloud facilitates a digital transformation by reducing the costs of investing in servers and limiting the need to hire and retain hard-to-find professionals.
  • The cloud helps the business with its pressing need to remain up to date
    The cloud acts as a driver of innovation by significantly cutting the time needed to acquire and implement business solutions. That’s because these solutions are already built and ready to be used once the integration is complete. By skipping the development step and challenges related to hosting, final users in the business department will be able to take advantage of their new tools quickly and enjoy a return on investment almost immediately.
  • The cloud simplifies the organizational model by positioning the IT department as a business partner
    The cloud and managed services are changing the role of IT leaders in a digital organization. Before, they were guardians dedicated to making sure the systems functioned properly. Now they have become brokers of solutions. Their role includes providing advisory services for their business counterparts and guiding them to the best options. They are the technological middlemen between a company’s functional needs and a cloud provider. In fact, the cloud provider will be responsible for the daily management of environments and solutions in the cloud (updates, corrective measures, monitoring, etc.) and for providing the level of services expected. IT teams can therefore focus on tasks that add value to their organization while business teams can concentrate on their own core business.

Have you considered the cloud as a way to foster collaboration and growth? At R2i, our specialists will help you get the most out of the cloud no matter what your legacy systems are. Get in touch with us today.

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