The adoption of cloud technology in federal agencies is a slow-moving and daunting task for both leadership and employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit \u2014 held June 11-12 in Washington, D.C. \u2014 government officials and the AWS CEO discussed the following ways for other public sector organizations to reduce some of the hardship:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don\u2019t forget the human<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Major Gen. John Ferrari, director of the Army\u2019s Program Analysis and Evaluation office, said that the most important aspect of cloud integration is the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem with legacy systems is that \u201cpeople build organizations around them, they build processes around them, and then when they try go to a new system that has different and better capabilities, what you hear is, \u2018Yeah, but I want to do it this way because that\u2019s the way we do it,\u2019\u201d Ferrari said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The key to solving this problem, Ferrari said, is to invest in technical training for employees. Ferrari\u2019s team didn\u2019t have the expertise on cloud systems, so Army PA&E decided to train them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou can scare off your own workforce if you\u2019re not careful,\u201d Ferrari said. \u201cWhat we told our workforce was, \u2018We\u2019re going in this direction and we\u2019re going to train you to come and work in this environment.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, reiterated Ferrari\u2019s stance. Jassy said that organizations need to avoid building a cloud that no employees know how to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou really got to make sure that you train people so that they\u2019re familiar and comfortable. It\u2019s not that hard as long as you learn the concepts,\u201d Jassy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Army PA&E\u2019s migration to the cloud forced Ferrari\u2019s team and contractors to evolve their core skill sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople are the centerpiece of this entire migration,\u201d Ferrari said. \u201cAnd if you go into your organization to do a migration \u2026 and you\u2019re not taking the human into account, I don\u2019t know how you will succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Backing from senior leadership<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cloud migration is a big technological leap for large organizations, which tend to adopt new technology slowly. An essential part of agency migration to the cloud is a senior leadership team that is \u201cconvicted.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt is so easy for people in the middle and people all over the organization to block,\u201d Jassy said. \u201cInertia is a very powerful thing. And if you don\u2019t have a senior leadership team that is all on the same page and convicted that they want to move to the cloud, you will find that there\u2019s a lot of things that get blocked along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jassy also said senior leadership needs to ask for constant updates so it knows that progress is being made, instead of assuming that it\u2019s being made and discovering later that it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within the Intelligence Community, commitment from leadership to cloud drove the community to a system that now allows them to operate significantly faster and ask more complex questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWithout the organizational commitment, we wouldn\u2019t put pressure on it,\u201d said Susan Gordon, principal deputy director of national intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). \u201cBecause, see, that\u2019s what organizational commitment does to things: It makes you have to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Department of Defense, the backing of senior leadership enabled the Army to complete its migration to the cloud. Ferrari said all business changes within an organization during a move are \u201cunderpinned\u201d by support from the senior leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe had that leadership backing to overcome a lot of that organizational resistance,\u201d Ferrari said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reward early adopters<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
To make people happy during disruptive technological change, rewarding \u201cgood behavior\u201d is another important component, said Kenny Bowen, chief information officer at the Department of Defense\u2019s Special Access Programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf there\u2019s only one thing, just one thing I want you to take away \u2026 it\u2019s that figuring out how to secure centralized funding for those early adopters is the most powerful thing,\u201d Bowen said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said that he finds early adopters more money to work with, even if they didn\u2019t ask for it. He gives them a fast pass through lines he controls and ensures that his department lends early adopters the best engineers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, \u201csupporting early adopters has been far more successful than anything else,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Learn how cloud works for you, don\u2019t do cloud to do cloud<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
At ODNI, part of organizational commitment was getting executives to understand how the organization would benefit from the technology, instead of what the technology did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI happen to care less about the technology; I care about the technology use,\u201d Gordon said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the Army, Ferrari said cloud computing fit the Army\u2019s structure because of the amount of data it consumes. To start a cloud migration, the organizational needs first need to be understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat is the business part of the business transformation. It\u2019s understanding really what that core function is you\u2019re doing, understanding your organizational structure and processes, and understanding how you\u2019re going to integrate vertically and horizontally,\u201d Ferrari said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Set aggressive, top down goals and start with the small<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ambitious goal setting in cloud migration can also drive an organization to adopt the new technology quicker, Jassy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOur most successful organizations moving to the cloud set an aggressive, top-down goal that force the organization to move faster than it organically otherwise would,\u201d Jassy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jassy said that he\u2019s found organizations gain momentum if they set aggressive targets for migrating data. But one area organizations get stuck on, he said, is how to move their workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe reality is that there are so many workloads that you can easily move before you have to move the hardest ones that have the most dependency and the most legacy,\u201d Jassy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jassy added that moving the smaller workloads over to the cloud first helps inform organizations on how to migrate the legacy systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey have a better way to do it once they got some experience,\u201d Jassy said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Top officials discuss why their cloud migration was successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":37550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":14,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,31,110,14,33],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3242],"class_list":["post-20955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-it-cloud-report","category-it-networks","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"SFMDR2WMBJBS7PLOVNZ6M72BEM","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2019\/06\/13\/5-tips-for-adopting-federal-cloud-technology\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n