​AWS Cloud Adoption Framework Part 4: Governance Perspective

​Welcome to Part 4 of our series on the Governance Perspective. In this article, we shift our focus to the crucial task of orchestrating cloud initiatives while maximizing the organizational benefits and also  minimizing many of the the transformation-related risks. 

​Governance plays a vital role in providing control and oversight to ensure that cloud adoption aligns with strategic objectives and delivers value to the organization. Indeed, when it comes to cloud transformation, the governance perspective plays a vital role in ensuring the success of your initiatives while minimizing risks.

This perspective focuses on control and oversight, allowing you to maximize the benefits for your organization. Within the governance perspective, there are seven key capabilities that are crucial to consider, as depicted in the figure below. Common stakeholders involved in this perspective include the chief transformation officer, CIO, CTO, CFO, CDO, and CRO.
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​Figure 1: AWS CAF Governance perspective capabilities

Program and Project Management

Delivering complex cross-functional cloud transformation initiatives requires careful coordination, especially in organizations with more traditional structures. Program management becomes especially critical, as it helps align multiple initiatives to optimize costs, schedules, efforts, and benefits. It is important to regularly validate your roadmap with business sponsors, escalating any issues to senior leadership to ensure accountability and transparency. An agile approach is recommended, allowing you to learn from experience and adapt as you progress through your transformation journey.

Benefits Management

The success of your cloud transformation relies on the realization and sustenance of business benefits. Clearly identifying desired benefits from the outset enables you to prioritize your investments and track progress over time. It is essential to establish metrics, quantify desired benefits, and communicate them to relevant stakeholders. Align the timing and life-span of benefits with your strategic goals and incorporate them into a benefits realization roadmap. Regularly measuring realized benefits and evaluating progress against the roadmap will help you make necessary adjustments.

Risk Management

Cloud adoption presents opportunities to reduce operational and business risks. It is crucial to identify and quantify risks related to infrastructure availability, reliability, performance, security, reputation, business continuity, and market responsiveness. Understanding how cloud can help mitigate these risks and continuously identifying and managing them within your agile cadence is key. By leveraging cloud capabilities, you can minimize upfront infrastructure expenditures, mitigate procurement schedule risks, and easily provision and deprovision resources as needed.

Cloud Financial Management

Combining the agility of cloud with financial accountability is essential for effective cloud financial management. Clarifying financial roles and responsibilities pertaining to cloud and ensuring a shared understanding of cloud costs among key stakeholders are critical steps. Adopting a more dynamic forecasting and budgeting process allows for better cost optimization. Aligning account structures and tagging strategies with your organization's mapping to the cloud provides a granular view of consumption patterns. Implementing guardrails to govern cloud usage, leveraging demand-based and time-based dynamic provisioning, and centralizing license management all contribute to optimizing cloud spend.

Application Portfolio Management

Managing and optimizing your application portfolio is crucial for supporting your business strategy. An accurate and complete application inventory enables you to identify opportunities for rationalization, migration, and modernization. Minimizing application sprawl, facilitating application lifecycle planning, and ensuring ongoing alignment with your cloud transformation strategy are key objectives. By starting with critical applications, mapping them to business capabilities and associated resources, and periodically enriching and validating application metadata, you can assess and maximize the value derived from your application investments.

Data Governance

Data is the foundation for business processes and analytics, and effective data governance ensures its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and relevance. Defining key roles, specifying standards, and establishing data quality standards are crucial steps. Monitoring data quality, identifying and addressing root causes of data quality problems, and implementing data quality dashboards help maintain data integrity. Additionally, establishing data lifecycle policies, modeling relationships between reference data entities, and ensuring compliance contribute to effective data governance.

Data Curation

Data curation involves collecting, organizing, accessing, and enriching metadata to build a comprehensive inventory of data products in a Data Catalog. A Data Catalog facilitates data monetization and self-service analytics by helping data consumers quickly locate relevant data products and understand their context. By identifying lead curators, cataloging key data products, capturing metadata (including lineage), leveraging automation and standard ontologies, and considering crowdsourcing for data enrichment, you can enhance the value and usability of your data assets.

Summary

​The Governance Perspective plays a vital role in effectively orchestrating cloud initiatives while ensuring maximum organizational benefits and mitigating risks. By leveraging the seven governance capabilities discussed in this article, organizations can establish control, optimize resources, and align their cloud transformation strategy with business objectives.

​Strong governance empowers stakeholders and promotes accountability, transparency, and informed decision-making. By delving deeper into each governance capability, organizations can further enhance their cloud governance practices and successfully navigate their transformation journey.

Join us in Part 5 of our series as we take a closer look at the Platform Perspective  and the core building blocks that form the foundation of cloud platforms, examining how they enable agility, scalability, and innovation.