AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Navigating the Cloud Journey: How Modernization GPS Unlocks Business Value Leveraging AI
By Thomas Counts, Managing Director – Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG)
By Dereck Vanlandingham, Software Engineering Lead – Accenture
By Mahesh Jadhav, Principal Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Dan Spillane, Principal Partner Development Manager – AWS
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| Accenture |
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Cloud computing offers technology providers unprecedented flexibility and scale, as well as exciting opportunities to explore growth and innovation. However, according to an Accenture survey, only four out of ten companies report that they have achieved the expected benefits of cost savings, agility, scalability, resilience in the cloud.
The reality is that many organizations face significant hurdles as they transition away from legacy systems. These include juggling technology adoption with business deadlines, addressing skills gaps and technical debt, and managing processes that span legacy and cutting-edge systems.
Additionally, consensus-based decision-making slows the progress, especially when dealing with topics such as cloud, integration, security, data, and AI.
Modernization GPS is a solution designed by Accenture and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to guide organizations towards more strategic and successful cloud adoption initiatives.
This blog explores how the solution can help align technology investments with company objectives and foster more effective decision-making between business and IT stakeholders.
Accenture is a global professional services company with deep expertise in helping the enterprise navigate the digital age. As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Accenture has helped many organizations move past initial barriers and unlock the agility and adaptability of the cloud.
Furthermore, the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG) brings the knowledge and resources to help customers navigate the necessary conversations between business and technology executives to drive the Modernization on cloud.
The State of the Technology Estate
For many enterprises, the current technology estate is characterized by on-premises infrastructure that is inflexible, heavily resource-dependent, and challenging to scale. Also, technical debt, outdated applications, data fragmentation, and manual processes impede agility and adaptability.
To make an evolutionary step forward, many organizations have opted to move away from legacy data centers to the cloud with a lift and shift approach to achieve immediate cost savings.
However, this strategy leaves many underlying aspects of the technology unchanged, meaning the organization is unable to access all of the innovative services and agility that the cloud offers. In other words, it can leave businesses stuck.
Both business and technology executives want to get unstuck, but it can be challenging to discuss investment strategies and associated responsibilities across these teams.
Most agree that big ideas such as “modernization,” “culture change,” and “digital transformation” are important, though many struggle to agree on how to turn these ideas into actionable plans, progress, and ultimately ROI.
Proactive collaboration is crucial. Business leaders should research emerging technologies in the industry to understand potential impacts for the enterprise. And IT leaders need data-driven insights that clearly illustrate the business implications of technology decisions.
To bridge communication between technologists and business executives, organizations need specific examples and impactful visualization.
For example:
- AI data-driven insights: Utilize AI to help ensure decision-making is informed by data.
- Tailored investments: Adjust technology investment opportunities to fit the organization’s needs, using known modernization pathways where possible.
- Model tradeoffs: Demonstrate a balance of aggressive and conservative technology adoption strategies, showing tradeoffs for both current and target states.
- Industry benchmarks: Measure progress of investments and benchmark the technology estate against industry peers in real time.
Enterprise modernization lead by AWS and Accenture can support all of this by providing assessments, tools, and processes that build trust between business and IT decision-makers and prepare them with necessary talking points to reinvigorate a modernization journey.
Move Beyond Lift and Shift with Modernization GPS
Much like how an electric vehicle’s global positioning system (GPS) reduces “range anxiety” in a cross-country road trip, a Modernization GPS assessment with Accenture and AWS can help reduce “cloud anxiety” during the transition from point A (legacy technology) to point B (modern services).
During a roughly two-week-long assessment, a trusted advisor analyzes the enterprise’s cloud consumption and identifies top-down modernization opportunities.
Modernization GPS provides data-driven insights about an enterprise’s underlying infrastructure and processes, visualizes potential technology investments through the lens of the AWS Cloud Value Framework, and benchmarks progress against industry peers.
All of this information can provide a powerful conversational framework to help business and IT leaders align on future priorities.
Using Modernization GPS, teams can reference concrete examples and plain-spoken explanations to help bridge difficult conversations. Selected investment opportunities are even translated into value measures that apply to agility and adaptability.
Key Features of Modernization GPS
Modernization index: Measures the agility and adaptability of the current technical estate. Lower percentages (<50%) indicate that an organization is in the early stages of evolving to cloud native. A higher percentage (>50%) indicates that the organization is adopting newer technologies.
This index is data driven from 50+ proof points derived from Accenture cloud modernization experience on the AWS Cloud and acts as a compass against industry peers. This index helps an organization keep pace based on desired risk tolerance or indicates whether it is falling behind the competition.
Modernization value creators: Quantifies underlying capabilities of the technology estate, displaying cost efficiency, business agility, staff productivity, operational resilience, and sustainability. Refer to figure 1 for sample modernization index and value creators.
Figure 1 – Sample modernization index and value creators
Priorities and investment opportunities: Identifies opportunities tailored to a customer’s cloud estate to set a framework of discussion, helping build consensus across partners and modelling the impacts of decisions within the modernization index and value creators. Refer to figure 2 for sample view of the modernization opportunities.
Figure 2 – High-level view of strategic and innovation opportunities
Using the Modernization GPS to Traverse Paved Paths
Many enterprises prefer to be fast followers versus early adopters of technology. Therefore, AWS identified six possible paved pathways to help accelerate the journey while minimizing risk.
Integrated within Modernization GPS, these pathways provide a proven and structured approach to tailor future investment strategies.
Benefits
Modernization GPS can help business decision-makers bridge the business value gap with a data-driven storyline that can be understood across departments.
The assessment also assists technical leaders in determining next steps for modernizing major applications and architectures—and supporting the business case for modernization efforts.
This valuable work can help reduce IT operating costs while scaling for business growth, enable teams to build products differently and faster through containerization and serverless architectures, help organizations eliminate technical debt, and reduce the risk of using unsupported platforms.
For example, Modernization GPS helped one global life sciences company uncover inconsistent policies across its AWS accounts that were lowering overall cost efficiency. Refer to figure 3 for a detailed view of one of the modernization opportunities identified by Modernization GPS.
It also helped identify teams within the organization that were utilizing serverless technologies in an innovative way, allowing for further cross-pollination that increased business agility.
Figure 3 – Detailed view of opportunities
Conclusion
This blog introduced the Modernization GPS solution as a way for business executives seeking to modernize their technology estates more efficiently—and communicate effectively with IT teams along the way. By leveraging this tool, organizations can overcome roadblocks and embark on well-structured modernization pathways tailored to meet both technology and business needs.
As technology continues to evolve rapidly, adopting a proactive and strategic approach to modernization will be crucial for businesses aiming to harness the full potential of cloud-native solutions and drive innovation in today’s competitive landscape.
For more information, visit Contact Accenture.
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Accenture – AWS Partner Spotlight
Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that provides end-to-end solutions to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. By working with the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, organizations can accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver disruptive products and services.