The document is a presentation by Thomas Blood on leading an organization through a cloud transformation. It discusses several key steps for the transformation including securing executive sponsorship, building a business case, forming an initial cloud team, selecting a partner, focusing on the first workload, and building security and compliance. It also covers accelerating the transformation by scaling teams, redesigning architectures, and building alliances. Reinvention includes practices like chaos engineering and adopting new data architectures using AI/ML. The presentation provides recommendations to think big, start small, and go fast when transforming an organization to the cloud.

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Thomas Blood, Enterprise Strategist, AWS
June 2018
Leading Your Organization
Through a Cloud Transformation

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Today’s Agenda
1 2 3
4 5 6
What is the problem? Where do I start? How do I build a foundation?
How do I accelerate? How do I Re-Invent? What are my next steps?

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My Background
Military
Data
Analyst
Software
Design & Production
Software
Cloud
AWS
Infrastructure
1990s
2000
2005
2010
2014
2016

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The Problem

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Everyone’s Journey is Different
The process is not sequential, you can start in different places

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The Problem

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What is Leadership?
“Leadership is a process of social influence, which
maximizes the efforts of others, towards the
achievement of a goal”
Kevin Kruse
Forbes Contributor
“…,against great odds.”
Thomas Blood
Enterprise Strategist, AWS

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Management vs. Leadership
Management Leadership
ChangeOrder
Planning and Budgeting
Organizing and Staffing
Controlling and Problem Solving
Establishing Direction
Aligning People
Motivating and Inspiring

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Clarity of Purpose
Where are you going? And Why?
• Is your vision sensible AND
appealing?
• How can the vision be
achieved?

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Business and IT Strategy
Business IT

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Securing Executive Sponsorship
Signal Intent
Network with PeersDelegate AuthorityEscalation Path
Amplify Message Remove Obstacles

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Building a Business Case
Business
Agility
Operational
Resilience
Workforce
Productivity
Cost
Avoidance
Operational
Cost

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“Single-Threaded Leader”
Cloud Transformation Leader
Visionary Empathetic
Influencer
Outcome Oriented
Owner
Mentor
Lead by Doing
Bold
Ambassador
Discerning
Trusted
Learner
Action oriented
Tenacious
Passionate

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Getting Started

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What is Culture?
Culture Is “the Way We Do Things Around Here.”
• Culture is the “software of the mind.” It is the core logic that organizes people’s behavior
• The culture reflects the lessons learned that are important enough to pass on to the next
generation
• Values, beliefs, and practices that have been
developed and reinforced over time

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What are Your Tenets?
Tenets
“a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true;
especially: one held in common by members of an
organization, movement, or profession.”
- Merriam-Webster

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Sample Tenets
2 Pizza Teams
Flexibility
You Build It, You Run It As the 2 Pizza Teams create features, they will own the support of the them 24x7. A strong emphasis on
pipelines, automation with Cloud Native will reduce overheard.
The Team We Have is the Team We
Need
We are always working to re-skill and retool and promote our workforce with the best knowledge so that they
can execute our cloud vision first, before trying to hire externally.
Teams Choose
The team with their product manager decides how to build and what tools to use to do so, as long as it meets the
organisations security and availability objectives.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Our business is large and diverse. Use the right tool for the job. We do not assume one size (tool or product) fits
all, but we do have strong opinions on how to solve common problems. We automate out opinions into simple,
integrated experiences. We remove and deliberately avoid undifferentiated engineering effort.
Get Out Of The Way
Allowing service teams to own their AWS adoption themselves, we decouple and decentralise development. We
prefer to build guardrails, not gates. We automatically audit for compliance.
We will organise ourselves into small teams no larger than 12, the teams wherever possible will be self contained
and have the ability to own their destiny and work schedule.
…unless you have better ones

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Everyone of Us
is a Leader on
Our Mission

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Forming the Initial Team
Cloud Architect
Applications
Infrastructure
Product
Security
Operations
Even Before a Cloud Center of Excellence
• 100 % dedicated
• Well respected
• Risk takers
• Continuously learning
• Believers of vision
• Results oriented
• “The go-to people”

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Selecting a Partner
You may need help navigating the unknown!

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Selecting a Partner
Best to have a guide who has traversed the terrain before
Cloud Architecture
AWS Services
DevOps + CI/CD
Organizational Structure
Communications
Training
Security Architecture
Security Testing
Compliance and Risk
Security and ComplianceImplementation Change Management

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First Workload
Kicking the Tires
• Customer facing / business value
• Small enough to get a quick win
• Hard enough to learn something

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Security and Compliance
Make the CISO your partner!
• Security as a foundational principle
• Automate as much as you can
• Test! Then test again!
• Review/translate/map security requirements
• Challenge assumptions
• Offer alternative mitigating controls

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Agile by Default
Unless There is a Good Reason Not to
• Individuals and interactions over process and tools
• Working software over documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
Agile Principles

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All of these reduce cycle time and allow builders to
focus on product, quickly deploying and collecting
feedback
DevOps
Promote and Enable Fast Feedback
DevOps Principles
Automate all things
Eliminate handoffs
Establish guardrails

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Development Practices
DevOps based organizations with continuous delivery
https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/
We found that, compared to low performers, high performers have:
• 46 times more frequent code deployments
• 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy
• 170 times faster mean time to recover from downtime
• 5.0 times lower change failure rate (1/5 as likely for a change to fail)

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Recognize Success

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Building a Foundation

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Create a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)
Cloud Services or Cloud Center of Excellence
Business Application Services
Cloud Engineering Cloud Business office
OperationsInfrastructure Security
Enterprise
Architecture
Governance
Training and
Engagement
Organizational
Change
Management
Finance

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Building 2 Pizza Teams
AWS Infrastructure
Engineers
Operations
Engineers
Lead
Architect
Security
Engineers
Application
Engineers

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Dealing with Resistance
FUD CONCERNDifferentiate
Convince
Educate
Clarify
or
Overrule
Analyze
Research
Offer Solution
or
Accept Risk

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Dealing with Resistance
FUD CONCERNDifferentiate
Convince
Educate
Clarify
or
Overrule
Analyze
Research
Offer Solution
or
Accept RiskExecutive Sponsor

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Dealing with Resistance
FUD CONCERNDifferentiate
Convince
Educate
Clarify
or
Overrule
Analyze
Research
Offer Solution
or
Accept RiskExecutive Sponsor
Break glass in emergency situations only!

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Overcoming obstacles to adoption
Don’t boil the ocean!
• Deal with obstacles as they arise
• Work with your Account Manager and TAM
• Turn the solution into repeatable
mechanisms as much as possible

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Educating the Organization
Create opportunities for learning
• Go to/organize an AWSome Day
• Lunch and learn
• Internal webinars
• Host meetups
• Organize hackathons
• Demos
• Stock a library with relevant books
Set up a wiki
• Links to video, blog, webinar, etc.
• Links to books
• Describe design and architecture
• Create training material with video, text,
graphics, etc.
Shout it from the roof top
• Webcast with executives and practitioners
• Organize town hall meetings
• Become a guest speaker at meetings
• Have an open door policy
• Talk to people
• Speak at conferences
Seek inspiration
• Attend re:Invent
• Attend summits, transformation days, etc.
• Send people to conferences
• Invite outside speakers

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Organize around outcomes
Methods to Manage your Technology Portfolio
PRODUCT
Continuous Development
Customer defines roadmap
Measured by output &
outcomes
BUSINESS OBJECTIVE
Maximize a strategic KPI
Types of KPIs: Minimize
waste, increase
conversion
Measured by outcomes
PROJECT
Pre-defined
requirements scope
and schedule
Deliver what was
planned
Measured by output

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Hiring and Career Maps
Partner with HR as early as possible
• Cultivate the culture you want and hire accordingly
• Hire the right talent – even if it costs more
• Outsource things not core to your business
• Create a career map for all affected job
families

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Transparency and Communication
Make transparency a
core value
Use information radiators, dashboards,
expose data
Pay attention to the
rumor mill
Dispel myths, use data
Control the narrative
Tell the story, celebrate wins, paint a
picture
Educate constantly
Encourage discussion (but not of decisions
already made)
Foster curiosity
Answer questions, use demos, invite
participation

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Acceleration

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Scaling the Teams
Team “Mitosis”

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Redesign
Application/
Infrastructure Architecture
App Code
Development
Full ALM
/SDLC
Integration
Purchase COTS/
SaaS & licensing
Manual Install
& Setup
Modify underlying
Infrastructure
Determine
new platform
Retain/ Revisit
Manual Config
Manual Deploy
Manual Install
Retire/
Decommission
Discover/Assess/
Prioritize Applications
Determine
Migration
Path
Use Migration Tools
Transition ProductionValidation
Automate
App Migration Patterns

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!
Building Alliances
What’s in it for each stakeholder?

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Coaching other Teams

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Re-Invention

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Chaos Engineering
Infrastructure
Switching
Application
People
Chaos
Engineering
Team
Tools
Security
Red
Team
Tools
Break it to Make it Better

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AI/ML
Algorithms
Insights
Data
Storage
Analyze
Alert
Store
S3
New Data Architecture

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Key Takeaways
Think Big, Start Small, and Go Fast!
• Have the courage to change
• Know where you are going
• Get help from partners and allies
• Cultivate the culture you want
• Challenge assumptions
• Encourage experimentation

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Some Potential Next Steps
1. Start…build something on AWS
2. Read the AWS Enterprise Strategy blog
3. Organize or attend an AWSome Day
4. Attend AWS events near you
5. Go to re:Invent
6. Take training online
Contact us, get started with a consultation from our architecture organization

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Recommended Books

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Books Written by AWS Strategy Team

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Jeff Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.
Invention comes in many forms
and at many scales. The most
radical and transformative of
inventions are often those that
empower others to unleash their
creativity—to pursue
their dreams.

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Thank You!