As we come closer and closer to one of our most impactful Product releases of VMware by Broadcom, I start a small series about the necessity of harmonisation between Technology and Operating Model, beside all our nice feature announcements.
The intent is to give you some food for thought, on how both together will help you be successful with your business.
But first, let’s start with giving some context.
Many of my customers today are confronted with a perfect storm. Legacy systems demand maintenance in times when business expectations rise, market trends accelerate, talent gaps widen – all while security and compliance requirements multiply. On top, we see geopolitical uncertainty, where sovereignty becomes a new priority.
The pace of digital transformation has turned technological adaptation from a “nice to have” competitive advantage into a “must have” survival skill. It’s a paradox: while public cloud adoption promises agility, cost reduction and fast time to value, many end up with multiple clouds, grappling with fragmented infrastructures, spiraling costs, and operational complexity. The real challenge isn’t choosing between on premise, public or private cloud solutions – it’s the art of mastering platforms.
Oftentimes, the transformative potential of cloud platforms is already recognized, yet many find themselves in hybrid environments, burdened by legacy systems they can’t abandon and cloud deployments that fail to deliver promised agility. The result? Operational complexity that stifles competitiveness and budgets that balloon without clear return of investment.
In today’s economy it’s not just about technology choices, it’s about an era where “doing nothing” risks obsolescence, while reactive, FOMO-driven decisions (fear of missing out) create technical debt. A “quick and dirty” solution today is tomorrow’s operational nightmare. The real challenge lies in building adaptive platforms that focus on reducing cognitive load for both consumers & providers, under an umbrella of an adaptive operating model, which is scalable, flexible and able to maintain the infrastructure in the long run with clear responsibilities.
For sure, not everything is perfect, every organization is somehow unique, but even so, we have seen similarities in the field, which I want to share to give you some food for thought.
In the following and upcoming Blogposts, I will highlight possible scenarios and actions you can take, based upon experiences that I’ve seen so far in the last couple of years working with customers on building Cloud platforms.
Synchronised evolution of technology and operating models
Deploying enterprise platforms, whether hybrid, on-premises, or cloud-native successfully means more than adopting new tools; it requires an evolution of technology as well as operating models.
These environments operate under fundamentally different paradigms. Simply replicating current structures, processes, and behaviors on cloud platforms often fails.
To quote Melvin Conway from the 60s:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
For over 30 years, IT has followed a “resource-oriented approach,” optimising individual resources with subject matter expertise. While effective in silos, this approach often neglects how other necessary resources are delivered. Consumers frequently request resources silo by silo, a process that can take months due to differing priorities and capacities, frustrating consumers, businesses, and IT departments.
When I started working with public cloud roughly 15 years ago, it was completely different from what I had experienced before in classic enterprise IT. Product teams were able to request resources according to their needs, instantly, and with transparent showback and chargeback mechanisms.
As we know, business services are not just a single virtual machine with storage. More often, they consist of a set of different technologies required to build and deliver the service, such as messaging capabilities, document storage, databases, and more.
In classic enterprise IT, providing all those resources on-demand, wouldn’t even have been possible due to the resource-oriented approach. Everyone focused on their own service and wanted to offer it in the best possible way, but without considering the overall consumption or the bigger picture.
To address this, a “flow-oriented approach” emerged with cloud platforms. This approach focuses on delivering services as a unified flow rather than requiring resource-by-resource requests. It feels like obtaining all necessary resources from one source.
Many organisations tried to solve this and established some form of Service Management function, this function was mainly orchestrating individual silos and aggregating information to the requestor. Many learned that achieving an unified flow only through closer collaboration between silos is often not solving the real issue.
What we see working better is a shift in organizational behavior, restructuring teams and responsibilities to offer resources in a self-service manner to consumers. But also, to introduce a Platform-as-a-Product thinking into the organization. That thinking and responsibility also helps the team to build and provide an even better Service, release after release, with focus on their customers and what they really need.
Additionally, cloud platforms thrive on standardised, self-service consumption. Providers must rethink governance, lifecycle management, and cost accountability. Automated policy enforcement (“define once, apply universally”) and compliance guardrails integrated into resource provisioning are essential to quickly adapt to new compliance and regulatory policies.
I mentioned the time when I started working with product teams using public cloud. We simply opened the door and flooded the teams with all these possibilities. Can you imagine what happened? There was a complete mix-up in the consumption of services, a nightmare in terms of compliance and auditing those environments. That was a period when we had to rebuild our cloud platform multiple times, learning from each new issue that arose.
However, it was also a time when we learned to adopt new practices for our operating models, such as offering the platform in a policy-driven way and building virtual private clouds for each product team. This helped us to structure, automate, and standardize our cloud platform, enabling us to offer it in a scalable way while remaining flexible to new regulatory requirements.
Although these experiences happened a long time ago, they are still relevant today. In discussions with many organisations, I often find that many of them have not yet explored this way of thinking. Adopting these practices helps organisations rethink how work is done, not just where it runs. This enables teams to transition from reactive “operator” roles to proactive “orchestrator” roles, allowing infrastructure to scale intentionally rather than sprawling accidentally.
Of course, implementing such significant changes is not something that happens within a few months or simply through discussions with peers from other departments. Often, it involves confronting cultural resistance and integrating new approaches with existing systems.
Many of the conversations I have with teams revolve around a culture that has been built over decades. These organisations have experts in many fields like networking, storage, compute, security, application development, and more. Just because you have a solution that you find innovative or “cool” doesn’t mean they automatically agree with you. Convincing them can be challenging, but everything starts with including them in the discussions. On the other hand, cloud platforms need exactly this consolidation and offer the opportunity to start those conversations.
This is the starting point of change! It’s not innovation, you have to start with, its called Exnovation! It defines the call to action, stop doing what you have always done!
We often find that involving different departments right from the beginning is key to success. It is important to clearly articulate the benefits and goals of the new platform or technology, and asking those teams for their advice is a strong starting point. Moreover, no solution on the market is absolutely perfect. Through detailed discussions, we frequently identified problems that other departments face with their current solutions – problems that the new technology might overcome. However, these insights only emerge when you engage in open, equal discussions with your peers.
So, what is the conclusion? It’s not a matter of technology nor of using or just calling it Cloud. Today’s expectations for Consumers and Providers differ, depending on what was built in the last decades. Just designing a system which represents your current organisation structure, will not be successful as a new approach could be. Think about new methods on providing services and how to manage them with patterns we learned over two decades from public cloud. Include your peers as soon as possible and use their expertise.
But, and that’s important, don’t over-engineer everything at the beginning, start with small steps, start with a small service to establish the first new operating model along the full end-2-end process, and grow from that baseline to start your cloud journey.
In the next Post i’ll write about why its quite helpful to map your business and IT goals with your platform beforehand, how this support you in your journey and why innovating together with partners is key.