We're continuing our series on Modern Cloud looking at the Modern CEO.
What does a CEO expect from Modern Cloud? They want capability from your engineering or IT organisation. They also want speed. And flexibility. I don't think they care about Lambdas or Kubernetes! It's good way to really frustrate your CEO if you tell him all about Kubernetes and Lambdas.
As a CEO, you're going to have the needs of your customers in your mind. You're going to have user groups needs for your company to meet. You can look at Modern Cloud and think, how can I rapidly meet the needs of those customers or users? What capabilities does Modern Cloud provide me with? They are looking to Modern Cloud to quickly stand up capabilities to meet those needs.
A big part of Modern Cloud is aimed at integrating with things that exist. Let's not build it. Let's not start way back with nothing and work our way up. It's the Buy, Rent, Build question! In my experience, CEOs are obsessed with the customer in the business domain that they're in. They're very focused on that industry. The healthy question to ask is: 'why are we building that?'. Why are we building that thing if it doesn't have anything to do with our core business. There's a value chain that you can draw.
There's a new appreciation that modern cloud can actually drive your business. It's not just a cost centre. If you have a modern cloud attitude in your company, engineering is actually part of the business. Engineers are not stuck in the IT department. If everything is stuck in the IT department and it is treated like a black box, you might be doing modern cloud, but you're not getting the commercial benefits from bringing the tech potential to your business leaders.
The next one is Speed. We've talked previously about 'Time To Value'. It's not how fast the developer can type in the code. It's the value stream from an idea to how quickly that makes it into the hands of the customers. That's not just IT. It's the whole org from front to back. And obviously, in the modern cloud, you can speed that up. You should be able to go from ideation, discovery and framing through to production and into the hands of a real customer and delivering value in days if not hours.
There's a nirvana point where you're having discovery and framing sessions with the business and your end users, and you're actually showing them real prototypes in real production environments that have been toggled appropriately so that they're not exposed to the existing customer base.
There is a flywheel effect here! But if the flywheel gets stuck and you're spending ages iterating, there's inertia and stoppage. When you start executing quickly, Product realises they can ask for things quickly. The flywheel starts to turn.
The third item is flexibility. There's a couple of different ways to think about this: the ability to pivot a line of business or the ability to scale in different ways or different global locations.
You're able to do 'safe to fail' experiments in a rapid fashion. Your feedback loop is a lot tighter. You can pivot more efficiently and effectively to find that product/market fit. From a CEO's point of view, they want to have lots of options and they don't want to go through one way doors, They want two way doors. So if it doesn't work out, they can come back out and try something else.
There are data implications as well. Organisations that embrace modern cloud are a
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Serverless Craic Ep16 Modern Cloud CEO