Ask a healthcare technology leader how the cloud is going and you will usually hear four things. Systems are up. Tickets are closing. The last audit passed. Spend is close to budget.
All four are good news. None of them tells the board what the cloud did for patients, members, or margin.
That gap has a history. When infrastructure lived in a data center, the job was to keep it running, and the scorecard measured exactly that. Then the infrastructure moved to the cloud and the scorecard came along unchanged. The cloud became someone else’s servers, managed to the same four numbers.
The trouble is what the old scorecard leaves out. It can’t tell you whether a new service reached patients sooner, whether a security review stopped costing you enterprise deals, or whether analysts finally trust the data platform. Those are the outcomes leadership answers for, and the cloud is now the thing most able to move them.
A different place to start
Healthcare Cloud Transformation starts from the other end. It begins with what the organization is trying to achieve and works back to the architecture, automation, and controls that get it there.
In practice that changes three things.
- The plan is written in outcomes. Each piece of technical work is attached to a goal a leader already tracks.
- Security and compliance get a purpose. They are where the work starts, and done well they let teams ship faster.
- Someone owns the progress. At Cloudticity that person is a Cloud Value Architect, who is measured on the customer’s outcomes and not on service levels.
A question to take to your next review
You can test your own scorecard in one meeting. At your next cloud review, ask what changed for the organization since the last one. If the answer is a list of tickets, patches, and percentages, you have the old scorecard.
That is no criticism of the team running your cloud. It means they are being measured on the wrong things, and they would probably welcome better ones.
The Cloud Value Journey is how we measure it instead: five stages, each answering one question, starting with “Can we trust the foundation?” and ending with “Is technology changing what’s possible?” Find the question your leadership is asking today, and you know where you stand.
We hold our own work to one line: make every human on earth healthier through it. A cloud scorecard that can’t be traced to patients and members is measuring the wrong thing.
Talk to a Cloud Value Architect about where you are on the journey.