When you boil it all down, Cloud FinOps is about a bunch of different people collaborating with other bunches of people that they’ve never had to collaborate with, to make 1000’s of complex, data-driven spending decisions, that they’ve never had to make before.

Clear? No.. of course not, but it’s about as clear as I can make it in one sentence. Let me break it down…

…a bunch of different people…

FinOps is primarily a people thing, not tools, not technology, not data, but people. The reason for this is that anyone in your organisation can be given the access needed to start deploying workloads in the cloud and as a result, the number of people who do get this access naturally increases as more and more applications are hosted in the cloud. This is a good thing. This is what provides the agility of cloud by breaking down the organisational barriers that used to slow down progress in the datacentre era. But it also has a dark side, these people now have the ability to make spending decisions on behalf of your company…

…that they’ve never had to make before.

I’ll repeat.. “never had to make before”. They don’t have the first clue about how to make good spending decisions. In fact, it doesn’t even appear on their radar. They have literally never had to think about it and it does not feature anywhere in their professional hierarchy of needs.

It is important at this point to clarify who “they” are. Firstly, they are the Architects, Developers, Engineers and Operations teams that are building and running your applications. They work in your business units, your outsourcers and your central IT function and they now have the power to spend. They report to Team Leads, Project Managers, Service Owners and Service Delivery Managers who have never had to manage people with the power to spend. These in turn report to Programme Managers, Business Owners, Divisional Heads and the like who have never had to govern this type of distributed budget and spend accountability within their wider teams. I could keep on going, but the point is that what you are left with is an entire org chart of unconscious incompetence.

If the challenge already seems daunting, it gets worse, it’s not just about getting people to make good spending decisions, but to…

…make 1000’s of complex, data-driven spending decisions…

Cloud is complex, powerful, granular, scalable and flexible. Again, all good things which enable the agility and responsiveness that allow your business to serve your customers in ways unimaginable a decade ago. But it is also built on a commercial model who’s primary purpose is to make money for cloud providers. As a result, decisions have to be made all the time about how to best drive value from the cloud.  It is also  completely unrealistic to expect the cloud users and managers in your organisation to be have all the knowledge to make these decisions. It takes tech experts, finance experts, data experts, business experts and good tools to put together the insights required to get these decisions right. It means that significant numbers of people in your organisation need to be…

…collaborating with other bunches of people that they’ve never had to collaborate with…

These relationships, processes, workflows and governance models are not naturally in place for this collaboration to effectively happen and this is what Cloud FinOps is all about. Bringing together the disparate teams in your organisation with the insights, knowledge, motivation and leadership to effectively work together and drive the significant value that cloud can deliver.

So how do you meet this challenge?

The most important thing to know about developing this capability in your organisation is to recognise that Cloud FinOps is a journey. You don’t change a big group of people’s way of working, relationships, and priorities overnight. It’s going to require good planning, communications, tooling, governance and it’s going to need a string of successes to build upon. It’s going have a few failures too.

The key, as with any journey, is to get started. That is where CloudStratex can help. We specialise in incubating and accelerating FinOps capabilities in medium to large organisations through our hands-on consulting services. We have spent years building and refining all the things you need get started and to then to accelerate you and your team’s FinOps journey. We also leverage our membership of the Cloud FinOps foundation to broaden our experience well beyond that of our direct clients so that we can bring you the latest thinking from the best of the industry. Finally, our focus on delivering those initial cost savings to kick-off the string of successes means we pay for ourselves in the shortest possible time.

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