Establishing the operating model for global cloud adoption

The challenge

Offices in different countries had each hosted and maintained their own communication, calendar, and document services. Consolidating onto a shared enterprise Azure environment promised consistency and economies of scale, but only if offices could actually get in. There was no common way to request access, no agreed split of responsibilities between headquarters and the offices, and no settled answer to a basic question: who pays for what?

Without those answers, every onboarding risked becoming a one-off negotiation. Engineering would keep reacting to requests instead of planning for demand.

My role and scope

I designed the operational framework for adopting the shared environment. I worked with the engineering team on the technical build. My remit was the business side of adoption: the information, responsibilities, agreements, and funding arrangements that let an office move in and stay well run.

Decisions and operating mechanisms

Standardized demand and onboarding information. With engineering, I defined what every office had to provide before onboarding: access roles, the applications in scope, primary and backup contacts, and expected consumption. A complete request gave engineering what it needed the first time.

A clear split of responsibilities. I set out what headquarters owned and what each global office owned across four areas: service management, acceptable use, maintenance, and payment. Making ownership explicit meant fewer escalations and fewer open questions after go-live.

Licensing, agreements, and funding built into the process. Licensing, internal agreements, and funding arrangements were steps within the onboarding path, not separate side conversations. An office that finished onboarding had also settled how its service would be paid for and governed.

Demand as an input to engineering priorities. Because requests came in a consistent format, recurring needs became visible across offices. I used that recurring demand to help set engineering priorities, so the platform grew toward what offices were actually asking for.

The central tradeoff was standardization against local flexibility. A common intake and responsibility model asked offices to give up some of the autonomy they’d had when they ran their own services. In return, they got a faster, more predictable path and shared accountability for the result.

Outcomes

• Reduced cloud onboarding time by 50% for offices joining the shared environment.
• Established a consistent basis for growth: a repeatable way to expand shared services, assign accountability, and prioritize demand.