Phase 1 - Vision

Building the leadership team (executive leadership / steering committee)

The first activity, and the most critical to transformation success, is establishing the executive leadership team. This includes defining roles and responsibilities, and identifying team members through staff organizational structures. An aspect of mapping team and staff structure involves mapping traditional roles to cloud roles. This includes mapping architecture, infrastructure, operations, security, business and IT alignment, project management, data, and applications on-premises roles. The necessary skills and competencies to successfully fill the positions are critical.

It is important to indicate the initial roles that are crucial to the success of the instantiation of the CCoE. The initial team members should be knowledgeable leaders across service lines from networking, security, operations, and application development, to migrations, databases, and infrastructure. They should be passionate about technology, but also have business acumen, the ability to internally evangelize technology and the value of the CCoE, and have enough internal political capital to directly access and communicate to line of business leaders. Organizations typically limit the initial leadership team to 3-5 people. This ensures an agile team that is empowered to make quick decision.

The first team members include:

1. An infrastructure and operations lead

2. A security and networking or migration lead

3. A Cloud Platform Engineering lead

4. A CCOE leader that is hands-on and a respected member of the IT organization

Part of building the team involves identifying the core services to be offered, and setting the team goals and metrics. At the initial creation of the team, less is more. AWS recommends keeping the list of services offerings and capabilities offered to under six in the first 2-6 months.