A New Framing for Cloud Innovation

Cloud innovation programs have competing priorities across the c-suite. Organizations can better align business outcomes with technical requirements and gain economies of scale across these programs with scenario thinking.

What if a large hospital system could aggregate all of its data for opioid prescriptions how many milligrams were prescribed, for what demographic patients, to achieve what types of outcomes in the last 30, 60, or 90 days? What if by doing so, the hospital could build-up months of data and start to understand prescribing habits for opioids, when a physician might be overprescribing or underprescribing, and what kind of correlation does or could that have on patient outcomes? Could it help to stop an epidemic? Would that allow the hospital to solve other challenges? Perhaps streamline insurance claims, better manage predictability around the prescription supply chain, or expand the technology to innovate around other approaches, such as cardiovascular disease data analysis or precision medicine? Some companies are asking these questions and building cloud-enabled solutions in an attempt to create this future today.1 This can be made a reality using cloud and artificial intelligence (AI). Cloud technology is expected to be a cornerstone of innovation strategies like this one.

Cloud is already set to drive significant transformation in every industry, sector, and domain over the next five years.2 That transformation or innovation will come from business agility, new products, data strategies, intelligent solutions, breakthroughs in software engineering and platforms, or ecosystems enabled by cloud. However, cloud investment isn’t keeping pace with these innovation goals. The future of cloud appears to demand a new approach, one that aligns cloud innovation strategy with future business goals enables leaders to make the financial and technical decisions today to create the innovative futures of tomorrow, and reconciles competing business needs with technical and financial considerations.

In essence, organizations are looking to use the cloud to drive secure, data-driven innovation and advance key business initiatives, but they have a number of competing business priorities. Therefore, by taking an approach that considers business, technical, and financial priorities together, they can gain greater value from their cloud innovation strategies.