The latest PwC's US Cloud business survey has left people with two minds. For example, 93% of the CIOs surveyed realize themselves as accountable for "Company-wide strategy and defining the business results and value we expect" for the cloud. However, as years ago, Billy Marshall declared, "The CIO is the last to know." The C-suite sets top-down strategy, the actual decision-making capability remains with the developers and others for the bottom-up execution.
The survey discloses the disparity between CIO theory and developer reality, where officials complain about the results they're receiving against their cloud investments. The report authors noted that "This unrealized value is vital, but it only communicates to cloud's untapped potential to propel strategy." Yet nearly 50% of respondents claimed that they couldn't measure the value of their investments. This claim suggests they'd emphasize paying closer attention to their people who can measure value because they're closer to the developers.
Almost 92% of the executive survey respondents say their organizations are entirely on the cloud. Everyone in the C-suite says that they are part of the cloud and the CIOs claim the optimum involvement in setting their companies' cloud strategies. However, the chief revenue officer, who can lead the customer satisfaction strategies through the cloud, gets involved seldom and almost at last among the other company executives in terms of defining cloud strategy.
Why are these executives inclining to the cloud? 34 % of the respondents claimed that improved resilience and agility as the primary reason. However, 18% believe that there is a big gap between the aspirations and realization of value. A guide map to understand the targeted outcomes and the expected gains shows persistent discord:
-
Effective decision-making through improved data analytics (34% vs. 16%).
-
Advanced products and services (33% vs. 15%).
-
Improved customer experiences (29% vs. 12%).
-
Profit growth (23% vs. 13%).
-
Efficient workforce recruitment and retention (23% vs. 10%).
-
Employee satisfaction (22% vs. 11%).
-
Cost-effective (21% vs. 9%).
-
Brand building and reputation (19% vs. 11%).
-
Ensure business steadiness (19% vs. 10%).
-
Combat debutant competitors (14% vs. 5%).
-
Interrupt our industry or other industries (12% vs. 9%).
With such critical statistics, PwC pins this "value realization gap" at 53%, on average. Probably, PwC was surveying the incorrect mass. As per the report, almost 49% of the business leaders see the difficulty to measure value, and nearly 48% CFO's say they lack in confidence about their capability to measure the return on cloud investments."
However, some people can measure the value directly from the workloads instead of the spreadsheets. Further, the role of the CIO or other C-level executives is no-less in cloud decisions. While open source and cloud trends routed the developers around cumbersome administration, the C-suite is gradually paving the path for the developers to build with cloud assets.
In addition, to know if an organization is fairing with cloud computing, it is significant to tap the developers for the ground reality because they are closest to its implementation.