New McKinsey research highlights that cloud migration needs to be combined with a comprehensive organizational approach to allow for a much more effective agile transformation. CIOs need to promote the transformation mind-set of focusing on differentiated business value by adopting agile processes, automating policies, and upskilling talent across the entire organization. They need to look beyond technology to change the way their IT organization operates across three foundational elements: people, processes, and policies. Priorities include upskilling existing talent and creating new roles (such as site reliability engineers, full-stack engineers, and data scientists), revamping procedures by adopting agile development processes with security integrated into every step, and enforcing policies through automation.

The research delves into the practices of leaders versus that of laggards and distills the key “unlocks” that can help organizations move to higher levels of business agility as they pursue increased cloud adoption.