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Establishing a modernization CCoE

Establishing a modernization CCoE

In this blog post, learn about our journey in establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence.

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Gokul Bala
Published Dec 30, 2023
Crayon is an established Premier Tier global APN Partner who helps its customers build the commercial and technical foundation for a successful and secure cloud-first, digital transformation journey.
In this blog post, I'd like to elaborate on Crayon's success in building a global CCOE.
The need for CCOE
  • Crayon had a vision and strategy to accelerate cloud adoption for customers – [Cloud Strategy, Migration, Modernization, Managed Operations]
  • Crayon’s end goal is to ensure customers receive the same high level of service they expect no matter who at Crayon they meet or where in the world they engage.
Define CCOE Vision
  • Acceleration: Repeatable IP and automated delivery of the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” to shorten the time to win, start, and deliver solutions and value to end customers. This also results in lower cost for customers, as Crayon does not need to bill for hours of development time solving problems the team has solved before.
  • Continuous improvement: By centralizing knowledge through the CCoE and building a culture of collaboration across organizations, Crayon continually improves the services through the lived experience of AWS experts. For example, having global teams iterating on and contributing updates to technical artifacts benefits all of Crayon’s future engagements.
  • Modernization: Business improvements for the customers are enabled from the start, but it doesn’t stop there. With a CCoE the solutions are cost optimized and better supported, allowing businesses to grow and perform better.
Business Case & Exec Sponsorship
  • Crayon envisioned the CCoE as a startup that is allowed to experiment, fail fast, and achieve results in an agile manner.
  • Like in any successful startup, it’s required to have the focus and commitment of the founders. In Crayon’s case, this is reflected in clear and strong commitment and sponsorship from the company’s management and executive teams
Build a ‘startup’ CCOE
  • Small team of senior experts.
  • Build minimum viable product (MVPs) of repeatable-IP that can be automated and delivered at scale.
  • Engage with customers early in the process.
  • Crayon envisioned the CCoE as a startup that is allowed to experiment, fail fast, and achieve results in an agile manner.
Accelerate Pilot customer Projects
  • Understand customers and their needs (customer discovery)
  • Support pre-sales to win end customers
  • Adopt the cloud in a matter of days and not weeks; kick-start the end-customer solution
  • Build trust quickly (internally and externally)
Scale with Repeatable Assets & Enablement
  • Build a product that will satisfy customers’ needs (customer validation)
  • Build the MVP and start collaborating with few accounts
  • Help implement the MVP > collect feedback > improve the MVP
  • Support all the customers (CCoE growth)
    • Customer validation phase is crucial to identify the right product but will not scale
    • Improve automation and documentation
    • Optimize knowledge transfer and encourage skills building
Scale with semi-decentralized CCOE
  • Expand throughout the organization in order to support any demand for our product (CCoE consolidation)
  • “As individual subsidiaries grow, a semi-distributed CCoE where local consultants act as CCoE extension to be closer to the local market and end-customers. This model allows Crayon to scale while supporting a large number of subsidiaries at the same time.”
  • Company-wide automation platform
Build Practices
  • Over time Crayon have built focused CCoE/Practices for Migration & Modernization, Data & AI
While the achievements of establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence can be seen above, some of the benefits are as below:
  • Accelerated AWS Adoption by customers
  • Reduced time, effort, cost for project delivery
  • Crayon local consultants have expressed positive feedback
  • Positive impact on Customer experience
  • Growth in reach and scale of AWS Business Unit
Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence is bound to be an asset to your organization and numerous service offerings are expected to grow out of it as a result!

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