The deep cloud alternative

When it comes to technology-driven performance improvement, business leaders should heed the wisdom of commercial fishing: If you want to catch bigger fish, go fishing in the deeper waters where big fish live.

If your organization has been investing in technology with expectations of meaningful business value—but it hasn’t yet realized that value—it could be because you’re fishing in the wrong places, in the wrong way, and for the wrong kinds of fish.

The deep cloud approach keeps the core of the business strong and healthy enough for continuous reinvention to be a viable strategy.

Is your organization stuck in the shallows?

Indeed, conventional adoption of cloud computing, data, software, and artificial intelligence (CDSAI) technologies and practices is like fishing for small fish in shallow water. There’s nothing wrong with small fish. Adopting cloud infrastructure to make enterprise IT more efficient is a good thing, and adopting software as a service (SaaS) to reduce the cost of HR, finance, CRM, and systems of record can be a very productive investment.

But those standardized functions don’t generate revenue and can’t differentiate the enterprise’s core value propositions. If your business is still dragging nets through the shallow, near-shore waters of back-office cost optimization, it’s not going to catch a bigger, more lucrative fish. Ever.

Consider some insights from the IBM Institute for Business Value. In our research, we’ve discovered that:

• Among stakeholders at large global enterprises, 37% say they’re “almost done” with their planned cloud adoption. Another 31% report being “stuck” midway after getting started.
• Most stakeholders say the digital “plays” they most want their cloud capabilities to strengthen are tactical instead of strategic.
• The failure rate of digital transformation programs—and now cloud adoption programs—remains stubbornly high.

Making technology count

A recent IBV survey asked respondents to report the level of difficulty they experience trying to generate new business value from technology adoption. The results were troubling.

The same survey asked about the specific challenges enterprises face with regard to modeling and improving current value stream performance—making the work of delivering business-critical products and services visible. Respondents reported similarly bracing data.

Any time you can make a business-critical value stream better, faster, easier to change, or less expensive to deliver, you unlock huge levels of new business value.

These data paint a picture of diminishing returns from current and conventional technology adoption programs. Doubling down with more programs, working the staff nights and weekends, blaming failures on overhyped technologies or on the people doing the work—these are classic signs that the existing system for converting digital technology into business value is flawed.

As the saying goes, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Conventional, cost-optimizing CDSAI adoption delivers incremental improvements because it’s designed to do so. If you want material improvements, you need to redesign the system.

We believe there’s a better approach. A better system. We call it “deep cloud.”

Deep cloud proposes that if you want to catch bigger fish—to make material improvements in how your core business performs—you must go fishing in the deeper waters where those big fish swim by taking on the most business-critical value streams and use cases in your enterprise.

Download the report to learn how the deep cloud approach can help your enterprise adopt technology in ways that attain new levels of business value.