Early this morning, delivered to my house by a crane where all the parts you’d need to build a wooden deck in my garden.
I spent far too much time measuring, re-measuring, re-measuring with a friend, re-measuring with a family member, drawing a scale model of the deck before ordering parts needed.
Here are some pictures of the model if you are interested. Top picture. Base picture
You are probably thinking, nice pictures, but what does building a wooden deck and technology value creation have in common?
Here’s a short story based on first-hand experience. PortCo A decided that all current apps and data needed to be migrated to AWS. AWS pitched an approach to them, 12 months, lift and shift, we start tomorrow.
After six months, they had migrated 10% of their applications and data into AWS.
This 10% accounted for 30% of their total technology spend. Straight-line math would have seen them increase technology spending from $20m P.A to $60m P.A.
When they reassessed their position, they found that they already had 4x the capacity they would ever need in their data centre. This migration project was shelved after 12 months.
The message here, measure five times, cut once or twice.
Had Portco A spent more effort measuring, re-measuring, getting a second opinion, they might have saved themselves $10m, 12 months of project time and the time to hire a new technology leader.
Where do you see the next value step-change created for your portcos? Is it with cloud migrations, or it is somewhere else?
Keep leading; it matters.
Until next time
Thomas
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