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Adopt a cloud mindset as part of the migration to Dynamics 365 online

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To succeed in your digital transformation journey, you need to embrace change as a constant. Change affects your processes, people, culture, and leadership. You also need to adopt a cloud mindset, which means thinking differently about how you design, develop, secure, and manage your applications in the cloud.

In this article, we'll explain why the cloud mindset is essential for migrating to Dynamics 365. We'll also explore the key characteristics of a cloud-first organization and how they can help you deliver more value, innovation, and agility to your business.

Tip

"Every company is a technology company, no matter what product or service it provides. Today, no company can make, deliver, or market its product efficiently without technology."—Forbes, "Why Every Company is a Technology Company"

Focus on business value

Technology is a powerful force that influences almost every business. You need to understand how technology affects your customers and your business goals. You also need to avoid letting technology hinder your growth or impede your business. The role of technology is to deliver business value by driving efficiency.

However, many enterprises have a complex and outdated technological landscape that fails to deliver the agility and innovation that the business demands. The IT departments are overwhelmed with maintaining software compatibility, update cycles, end of life deadlines, aging infrastructure, and old security policies. They have little time to focus on delivering positive business outcomes.

A cloud approach to your business applications can simplify many of these concerns. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure and operational IT effort to keep the servers running, software patched, and other routine tasks. The IT team can focus on the business application layer and have more opportunities to add value to the business.

Traditionally, business applications were built to capture, track, and report on key business processes. They usually had a user interface (UI) on top of a data store to capture or display the information. These "forms over data" software applications helped organizations keep track of information and make it easily available through reports. However, they didn't really help users do their jobs faster or better. They were data capture tools that didn't differentiate your offerings and customer experiences from your competition.

Today, you need more than just the best deal or the best quality product to win in a hyper-competitive environment. You need to personalize your service, respond to your customers' unique behaviors, and react to changing market demands. You need to harness the data that you have from various sources (such as social media, online browsing, and in-store purchases) and turn it into actionable insights and recommendations. You need to manage product recommendations, unique promotions, and tailored communications across all channels.

Dynamics 365 applications can help you do all these things and more. They're focused on delivering value to the business and empowering users, changing the business application industry paradigm by forcing every business to innovate faster.

The "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" mentality common in large organizations, where business applications can remain unchanged for several years, puts the enterprise at risk. You might face disruptive competitors, changing customer expectations, and shrinking market share. You need digital transformation technology that gives you the command of three essentials: deep, cross-channel customer insight, synchronized operations from front end to back end, and agility to drive rich experiences as needed.

Your business applications shouldn't be designed and deployed with an expectation that they remain unchanged for long periods of time. Instead, the core design principle for business applications should be ease of change. You should take advantage of the continuous updates and enhancements that the cloud delivers. You should adopt the latest best-in-class capabilities and use them to drive business value and adoption.

Technology is becoming so powerful and democratized that nondevelopers and people with no formal training in software development can build applications. They can create workflows that automate their work, and use machine learning with ready-made AI models to analyze data. This concept of citizen application development has drastically transformed businesses, where users are developing solutions to solve business problems and sharing them with colleagues. This organic approach to app development has shortened the application development lifecycle and helped address the issue of software adoption. IT departments are now responsible for the governance of these applications. They have to secure the access to data and environment, and focus on building the underlying services and connector interfaces that the business can consume in their applications.

These scenarios all help illustrate how a transition to the cloud can play an instrumental role in refocusing technology to deliver business value.

Be data driven

Data fuels the disruptive innovation we're seeing across several industries. Almost everything around us generates data—appliances, machines in factories, cars, apps, websites, and social media. What differentiates one company from another is the ability to harness this data and successfully interpret the information to generate meaningful signals that can be used to improve products, processes, and customer experiences.

Organizations recognize data as an asset, and becoming data driven is a key motivator for digital transformation. However, the accounting rigor that we see in finance is seldom observed when it comes to managing organizational data. If data is the new currency, then we should treat it like that. We should understand our organizational data estate, including the databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. We should manage our corporate data and develop a holistic view of customer data across departments, functions, and applications, while acknowledging the regulatory boundaries on data usage. These steps are essential for digital transformation.

Depending on the volume of data, its age, and organizational silos, the deduplication, correlation, and conflation of data from different systems could become a complex project on its own.

Modern AI-powered customer data platform (CDP) technologies like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can help. A CDP tool creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned, and combined to create a single customer profile.

It's also important to define your organizational data strategy for business applications. You should develop guidelines on how new applications store their data, what schema they use, and how other applications in the organization can understand and use this data. You should use the most optimal data store for your use case. For example, keeping historical transactions in Dataverse is suboptimal; a data lake might be a better choice.

Being data driven is about better understanding your data's quality and relevance, and being able to generate valuable insights that are actionable and can provide feedback loops to improve your business processes. You should also design your processes, applications, and operations to embrace change. If it takes several months to deploy a change request or years to roll out an improved process, there's little point.

A data-driven business application cloud platform like Dynamics 365 enables you to:

  • Create a data estate that is intelligent and AI-ready
  • Connect and consume data from legacy on-premises systems, other line of business applications, and third-party applications
  • Have the necessary controls to secure and meet data compliance requirements
  • Build smart applications that are continuously improving
  • Infuse data intelligence directly into the application, empowering users to make effective and smart decisions
  • Have agility so applications can quickly adapt to changes in your process

Overall, the intelligence and insights you generate from your data are proportional to the quality and structure of your data. You can explore this subject more in the articles Data management and Business intelligence, reporting, and analytics.

Think platform

An organization can take several approaches to digital transformation. In many cases, you start with a single application being deployed to a software as a service (SaaS) cloud. A key responsibility of IT decision-makers and enterprise architects is to deliver a cloud platform for their organization's digital transformation. Individual applications and their app feature sets are important. But you should also look at the bigger picture of what the cloud platform offers and what its future roadmap looks like. This will help you understand if the platform can meet the short-term and long-term objectives of your digital transformation.

Thinking about the platform versus a single app offers clear benefits. You avoid reinventing the wheel with each extra application, and you instead deliver a foundation approved by governing bodies, with clear patterns and practices. This approach limits risk and brings a built-in structure that enables reuse. Platform thinking doesn't necessarily mean that other cloud platforms or legacy applications have to be rebuilt and replaced. Instead, you can incorporate them as part of an all-encompassing platform for your organization, with well-defined processes and patterns that enable integration and flow of data between applications. Bringing this "systems thinking" to deliver a platform for business applications can drastically reduce the amount of time lost getting security and design approvals for individual apps, thereby improving your agility and time to value.

Your business applications platform should provide the following aspects:

  • Necessary security and design approvals for processing data in specific categories based on its sensitivity and regulatory requirements
  • Clear guidelines on extending and customizing the platform to ensure supportability and agility
  • Established governance process to manage access and service operation
  • Approved integration patterns for communication with other platforms and on-premises systems, with a clear process for approving deviations
  • Data storage guidelines for apps and patterns for sharing
  • Clear guidelines for data ownership and access
  • License entitlements that are available for individual apps
  • Documented service protection limits and best practices that your applications should comply with
  • Resources for more learning and guidance with access to experts

The due diligence and foundational work you do with IT and business decision-makers to choose the right cloud platform can save weeks, if not months, of effort downstream. This thorough evaluation also helps drive predictable success.

Embrace DevOps and automation

Traditionally, the process to manually release a change to applications was convoluted, involving several teams, change boards, manual regression tests, and approvals. It took weeks. This complexity made teams averse to change. Enhancements and updates were then consistently deferred, which affected the adaptability of your applications to shifting business and technology priorities. Automating builds and releases and building in testing automation is crucial to allow for continuous software updates.

The biggest selling point of the cloud is that it helps you stay current and quickly deploy software. Relying on manual testing to validate cloud software updates can place a significant drain on your team's resources and might lead to inconsistencies if testing is neglected.

Traditionally, there was a time lag between code and test and deploy. A bug in production meant repeating the lengthy cycle. The fear of breaking code meant that teams tended to delay updates for as long as possible. With automation, you deploy fast and potentially fail fast. This is where the culture of fail fast comes in. Automated processes help companies empower their teams to take risks. You fail but quickly release a fix. Over time, failures decrease and success rates improve, instilling confidence in teams to deploy and innovate and delivering value to the business faster.

At the core of the cloud mindset is understanding and embracing DevOps. Azure DevOps helps combine people, process, and technology to continually provide value to customers. DevOps is a cultural change in which we break down silos between developers and administrators, and create shared responsibility for the quality of released software. The DevOps process—a continuous cycle of "Plan > Code > Build > Test > Release > Deploy > Operate > Monitor"—automates software delivery and speeds up the technology deployment lifecycle.

The idea is to have development, IT, quality, and security teams collaborate to produce more reliable and quality products. Together, they can innovate and respond more quickly to the changing needs of the business. Implementing DevOps inherently depends on automation: automating the build process to enable continuous deployment, regression tests to improve speed and reliability, and administrative actions like user and license management.

At this point, we should also explore continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) in the context of the cloud. The idea is each code check-in from the developer should go into the main build and get tested early. This approach takes CI to the next level by allowing for automated testing and continuous, automated code deployment. If a change includes a bug, the build fails, and the cycle repeats. The automation allows for changes to happen quickly without unnecessary overhead. A team can focus on the business logic and not the infrastructure. Therefore, with CD we always have the most up-to-date working software. CI and CD bring agility to cloud solutions by allowing for the latest changes and bug fixes to move to production code without delay.

But this isn't just a technological change. DevOps requires close collaboration between development, testing, and deployment teams. This is a cultural and mindset change in which the whole team trusts each other, feels empowered, and is collectively responsible for product quality. Preparing your organization for the fast-paced world of the cloud means that automation isn't optional anymore.

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