Getting buy-in for any decision, especially cloud migration, can be an uphill task. There are usually winners and losers. The losers will often keep trying to change the decision or go for their pound of flesh by waiting for things to go wrong and taking the “I told you so” track.
The best counter to this is due diligence and transparency.
Make sure decisions are made based on facts with each stage of the decision-making process communicated. For cloud first, this means having a transparent process for the selection of business applications by projects and programs. Indeed this is an essential element of IT governance, irrespective of whether you are following a cloud first strategy or not.
One of the obstacles to overcome is that the various teams who should be working in sync on cloud first and business application decisions, e.g. PMO, enterprise architects, application managers and platform experts, are often instead working in silos. Having them work with a common application inventory will help bring them together, and more can be achieved.
They can use an integrated IT portfolio inventory containing not only applications, but also the projects targeting them, the technologies used by them, the business capabilities supported by them, and the organizations which use them. With this inventory the impacts of project decisions on the IT landscape will be fully understood and considered.
In other words, your applications in the cloud won’t just work – they’ll work for your business.