AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: People Perspective

Publication date: January 10, 2023 (Document revisions)

Abstract

As the proliferation of digital technologies continues to disrupt market segments and industries, adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help you transform your organization to meet the changing business conditions and evolving customer needs. As the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, AWS can help you reduce business risk; improve environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance; increase revenue; and improve operational efficiency.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) uses AWS experience and best practices to help you digitally transform and accelerate your business outcomes through innovative use of AWS. Use AWS CAF to identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve your cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve your transformation roadmap.

AWS CAF groups its guidance in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective is covered in a separate whitepaper. This whitepaper covers the People perspective, which serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth, learning, and where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership, and workforce.

Are you Well-Architected?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.

For more expert guidance and best practices for your cloud architecture—reference architecture deployments, diagrams, and whitepapers—refer to the AWS Architecture Center.

Introduction

Millions of AWS customers, including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government organizations, use AWS to migrate and modernize legacy workloads, become data-driven, automate and optimize business processes, and reinvent operating and business models. Through cloud-powered digital transformation, they can improve their business outcomes, including reducing business risk, improving ESG performance, increasing revenue, and improving operational efficiency.

Organizational ability to effectively use the cloud to digitally transform (organizational cloud readiness) is underpinned by a set of foundational capabilities. A capability is an organizational ability to use processes to deploy resources (people, technology, and any other tangible or intangible assets) to achieve a particular outcome. The AWS CAF identifies these capabilities, and provides prescriptive guidance that thousands of organizations around the world have successfully used to improve their cloud readiness and accelerate their cloud transformation journeys.

AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives:

• Business

• People

• Governance

• Platform

• Security

• Operations

Each perspective comprises a set of capabilities that functionally related stakeholders own or manage in their cloud transformation journey.

The People perspective serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth, learning, and an environment where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership, and workforce. It comprises seven capabilities shown in the following figure. Common stakeholders include chief information officers (CIOs), chief operating officers (COOs), chief technology officers (CTOs), Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs), cloud directors, and cross-functional and enterprise-wide leaders.

People are the lifeblood of any successful cloud transformation effort. Having a workforce that is skilled, motivated, engaged, and driven by a leadership team that is committed to the value and return on investment of cloud will have a flywheel effect on your organization. As leaders become more inspired by customers and want their business to innovate, they will drive their workforce to learn and develop more technologies powered by cloud. This will result in a culture that is continuously learning, innovating, and open in their communications, lessons learned, and even failures.

AWS and the AWS Partner Network (APN) provide tools and services that can help you along each step of the way. AWS Professional Services is a global team of experts that provide assistance through a collection of AWS CAF aligned offerings that can help you achieve specific outcomes related to your cloud transformation.

AWS CAF People perspective capabilities