The Business Case for Cloud

Back in the fall of 2022, our CEO gave my colleague and me a task: figure out why cloud wasn't living up to its hype in terms of value. Knowing what I knew about how few companies embraced value management, the surge in digital transformation sparked by COVID, and years of seeing IT cost reduction’s ROI in the double digits, I had a feeling what was up. Nevertheless, the two of us got to work on the research and took it a step further, modeling out a few scenarios of the business case for cloud.

Turns out, my suspicions were right. Decades of slashing IT costs had left little juice in that squeeze! Thanks to COVID, everyone hopped aboard the digital transformation train without realizing that the benefit lies within the business – think happier customers, higher productivity, optimized supply chains, more efficient manufacturing, ability to scale, better analytics, etc. etc., and no one was prepared to identify, baseline and track the value.

Value management, benefit realization, value hub, value realization… is still very much in its infancy, but I’m happy to see a surge in the market. Seems like every company I talk to is in the process of setting up this capability.

Having become passionate about this over 15 years ago, building KPMG’s offering, and standing up the same at TCS, reach out to me if you have found yourself being asked to identify, quantify, and track the value of your transformation.