Discussing cloudsourcing and corporate transformation with an "execution specialist"

I was excited to host Mark Newhall for a webinar last week on the "Path To Cloudsourcing."  Mark is an expert at corporate transformation, often-times powered by cloud technology.  He was a very early adopter of salesforce.com at Corporate Express, where he lead the global transformation of their customer-facing processes.  As COO of Market Force Information, a customer intelligence firm, he charted out a 3 year roadmap to move entirely to the cloud, enabling a new growth strategy.  He now leads Execution Specialists Group, advising C-level executives on business transformation strategies.  

Our discussion focused on building, executing and measuring the success of a comprehensive cloud strategy.  You can view the full webinar here-- below are some highlights from our conversation:

Tell us about your experience with Salesforce at Corporate Express.  Was the adoption led by the business or by IT?

Back in 2002, our initial adoption was led by the business.  It started with a couple of sales teams who adopted Salesforce and started getting fantastic results.  Of course, because of this initial success, we wanted to roll out Salesforce more and that's when we started working with IT.

At the start, it was a bit of a battle.  The business was out getting fantastic results.  But IT had concerns about security and availability.  Since we were a pretty early customer of Salesforce's, we had great access to the management team.  We were able to visit their data centers, meet their security team and get comfortable with what they'd put in place.

As IT started to get more involved, they saw first-hand how much better things were than with traditional software.  Things like regression testing, user acceptance testing, etc. were much easier with Salesforce.

The relationship became really collaborative when we started integrating Salesforce with other systems.  When IT got their hands into Salesforce, they realized it was the future.  We saw a lot more adoption and acceptance after that.  It quickly became clear that Salesforce was the best place for all of our customer interactions.  By the time we moved to Europe, there were no battles.

Over the past 8 years, I've seen the pendulum swing the other way with IT now starting to lead the way, driven by their executive teams.

Fast forwarding a few years, could you tell us about your experience building a cloud roadmap at Market Force Information?

Market Force is a very fast growth, fascinating business.  They have 300,000 mystery shoppers inspecting the retail experiences at the largest stores in the US.  

When I joined, we wanted an IT infrastructure that enabled us to grow easily and that could help us react more quickly to the needs of our customers.  We took a strategic look at the cloud to see whether we could build a roadmap that would help not only to take IT costs down but also improve our business processes.

What really fueled the conversation was the opportunity for business benefit.  What got our CEO excited was being able to go back to the board with new growth strategies and that's what our cloud roadmap enabled us to do.

Is a cloud roadmap something CEOs are interested in?

The cloud is intriguing to CEOs not only because of the opportunity to cut IT costs-- the cloud actually creates new opportunities for the business.  You can't deny the results.  Companies that act today will gain a significant competitive advantage both in terms of IT cost as well as business process efficiency and agility.

What's happened over the past 5-10 years is that enterprise IT has fallen behind consumer IT, especially from a user-experience perspective.  A recent client told me "I feel like I take a 15 year step backward when I come in to work".   It's not the fault of IT, they're constrained by their tools.  One of the exciting things about cloud computing is being able to change this.

CIOs who begin the cloud strategy conversation will most likely find a receptive audience within their companies.  We had dinner with the CEO of client recently.  Somehow the word "cloud" came up and the entire senior leadership was fascinated and engaged.

How does one get started in terms of building a cloud strategy?

Starts with a cross-functional look at what's happening today - what systems are being used and which systems are not being used. Take a look at how the work gets done, identify the process inefficiencies and then build a cloud roadmap.  It's not a big bang approach.

You really need strong sponsorship from a CEO, CFO or COO to transform the business.  Going app by app or platform by platform, it's going to be much more difficult than if you have a systematic roadmap approach.

What are the right metrics to evaluate your cloud initiatives?

At Corporate Express, we were talking about business solutions.  It's not like writing a check for hardware or software-- think of your investment in the cloud as an investment to change your business.  If you look at purely from an IT perspective, any investment is a harder conversation. Having a roadmap-driven approach can help you create self-funding projects that help you transform the business.  In the projects I've been involved with, the ROI was so compelling that we didn't see a need to spend too much time on formalizing it.

Thanks again for your time, Mark, for a fascinating conversation about the cloud and business transformation.  Stay tuned for a follow-on post where we'll take on some of the questions asked by the audience.  

Ryan Nichols is the Vice President of Cloudsourcing and Cloud Strategy for Appirio.