Define a roadmap

You might have seen the following quote from Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon: "You build it, you run it."

This was from the 2006 interview A Conversation with Werner Vogels: Learning from the Amazon technology platform (ACM Queue, Vol. 4, Issue 4, June 30, 2006). Werner talked about how teams at Amazon functioned (the operating model) and described breaking down walls between development and operations. Establishing cross-functional teams that have all the capabilities required to build, deliver, and support their product has become a requirement for a true digital transformation.

However, that digital transformation, which is supported by your Cloud Operating Model, is often seen as too much change to manage at one time. Instead, we consider the analogy of a journey with a roadmap that takes you to "You build it, you run it" as the destination. Each increase in the maturity of your capabilities moves you closer to your destination. By the time you have reached your destination, your organization will have developed a way to continually update the Cloud Operating Model to match changing business outcomes, and the roadmap is updated with the next destination.

To support this incremental approach, we recommend that you develop a roadmap that directly relates to your organization's vision (mission and drivers) and defines the steps (increases in maturity, guided by tenets) that are necessary to reach the destination (outcomes).