Accelerating cloud adoption through culture, change, and leadership

Amanda Rankin, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

August 2019 (document history)

The people, culture, and change leadership domain is critical to establishing your organization’s cloud readiness and implementing a migration at scale. The impact of the cloud will be felt across your entire organization and will significantly affect, and be affected by, your organizational culture. Understanding these cultural implications, your company's receptivity to change, prior change successes and failures, organizational communication patterns to date, organizational structure, and level of executive sponsorship, commitment and alignment, are all important elements of building a successful approach to cloud adoption.

To prepare for an enterprise migration, your organization must have a critical mass of people with production experience in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, established operational processes, and a leadership team dedicated to mobilizing the appropriate resources and leading teams through the many organizational and transformational challenges presented over the course of a large-scale migration effort. Based on many years of experience leading and advising enterprises across a wide array of industries, AWS has found that organizational adoption of change and political and cultural impact are the most challenging and underestimated roadblocks to cloud adoption success.

This guide discusses critical elements of change adoption, mechanisms for acceleration, and a framework for ensuring that the people in your organization who are impacted by the transformation effort will be well positioned to adapt when needed. This process, which we call change adoption and organizational acceleration, is an extension of the organizational change management (OCM) framework, which can and should be customized to fit the needs of your organization.