New Challenges in Cloud Adoption - The Users!

In the early days of cloud computing, winning over the CIO to the idea that cloud providers were safe, reliable and better than other alternatives was the primary challenge. Now that CIOs are increasingly comfortable with the cloud, the focus is shifting to an even tougher audience: the end-users.

Cloud computing has made it so that IT systems can live (and evolve) faster and easier than ever before, but organizational change management and user adoption methodologies have not kept up. Quite simply, technology can move forward faster than the organizations in which it is introduced.

Cloud computing has made it faster, cheaper and easier for organizations to deploy systems, but it may have actually made it harder for the users to adopt them. And if people don’t use the system, it fails to deliver any value to the organization. If this happens, both the client and the cloud provider will suffer.

So why is it harder for end-users to adopt cloud solutions?
• Cloud solutions are often implemented faster than traditional system deployments, dramatically reducing the time available time deliver organizational change management initiatives

• Cloud deployments are often perceived as “easier” than traditional system deployments, and there is not always the perceived need (and budget) for organizational change efforts

• Many cloud providers introduce new enhancements and functionality on a regular basis, thereby transforming the users’ learning “curve” into a learning “treadmill”

• Change Management efforts are still focused on the initial go-live, but do little to sustain user adoption over the life of the system.

This presentation will examine some of the unique challenges of cloud computing from an end-user perspective. It will identify shortfalls of common change management efforts and provide alternatives for how to improve change management and user adoption efforts to better suit cloud systems.

Attendees will gain new insights into what it takes to have a successful cloud implementation and learn what they can do to immediately begin improving adoption of their cloud systems.