What sort of org structures work well for helping to drive successful cloud adoption? Every day I talk to businesses and public-sector entities about this topic. Some have been successful. Others are struggling. And the late-adopters are just starting out and want to get it right from the start.

Back in 2014, I started giving conference talks about an emerging industry best practice — the “Cloud Center of Excellence” (CCOE) concept. I published a research note at the start of 2019 distilling a whole bunch of advice on how to build a CCOE, and I’ve spent a significant chunk of the last year and a half talking to customers about it. Now I’ve revised that research, turning it into a hefty two-part note on How to Build a Cloud Center of Excellence: part 1 (organizational design) and part 2 (Year 1 tasks).

Gartner’s approach to the CCOE is fundamentally one that is rooted in the discipline of enterprise architecture and the role of EA in driving business success through the adoption of innovative technologies. We advocate a CCOE based on three core pillars — governance (cost management, risk management, etc.), brokerage (solution architecture and vendor management), and community (driving organizational collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and cloud best practices surfaced organically).

Note that it is vital for the CCOE to be focused on governance rather than on control. Organizations who remain focused on control are less likely to deliver effective self-service, or fully unlock key cloud benefits such as agility, flexibility and access to innovation. Indeed, IT organizations that attempt to tighten their grip on cloud control often face rebellion from the business that actually decreases the power of the CIO and the IT organization.

Also importantly, we do not think that the single-vendor CCOE approaches (which are currently heavily advocated by the professional services organizations of the hyperscalers) are the right long-term solution for most customers. A CCOE should ideally be vendor-neutral and span IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in a multicloud world, with a focus on finding the right solutions to business problems (which may be cloud or noncloud). And a CCOE is not an IaaS/PaaS operations organization — cloud engineering/operations is a separate set of organizational decisions (I’ll have a research note out on that soon, too).

Please dive into the research (Gartner paywall) if you are interested in reading all the details. I have discussed this topic with literally thousands of clients over the last half-dozen years. If you’re a Gartner for Technical Professionals client, I’d be happy to talk to you about your own unique situation.