What are the best strategies for adopting cloud, automation, and artificial intelligence in IT operations?

My recommendation would be to start with the financial model and build it from a FinOPS perspective. ITIL, CAF and AMM are all IT related tools not known in finance. You going to spend all your time educating business. OPEX models is a major shift for business to understand.

From crafting interior masterpieces to engineering IT excellence –my journey was a leap of passion and adaptability. As an interior designer, I reveled in color palettes and spatial harmony. Yet, a chance client introduced me to DevOps, and I was captivated. The transition wasn't immediate; it was a process of self-discovery. I assessed my current state and maturity level using frameworks like the Automation Maturity Model (AMM). My eye for detail and project management skills from design translated beautifully into IT operations. Now, as a DevOps engineer, I find joy in automating, optimizing, and ensuring systems run flawlessly. My unexpected shift taught me that passion and adaptability can unlock new horizons, even in the tech world.

Always start with why! Cloud, automation and AI are buzzy, and rightly so. But every organization is unique in terms of benefits and outcomes to be realized. New technologies will always introduce bumps in the road and ever newer technologies are introduced on the regular. Answering "why" ahead of time, and documenting what success looks like, will keep you true to achieving the desired outcomes even when it gets tough or when shiny new things start to distract. Great leaders know when to stay the course and when to pivot. Knowing why you're doing what you're doing makes it easier to evaluate which path to take.

Be aware that cloud migration is not a "fix" to eliminating tech debt. Address that tech debt first, even if it means capital expenditures to bring your hardware up to modern spec. The entire purpose of cloud migration is to future proof your infrastructure and prepare it for efficient growth over time, while simplifying the perennial challenges of DR strategy, high availability, and infrastructure management. But you can't do any of that if you have an out of date stack on prem.

Driving operational efficiencies and business value should be at the heart of this exercise. This can be done by baselining the current strengths, opportunities, threats and weaknesses. This is vital to evaluate strategy and bring in Cloud, Automation and AI to IT operations. Time and tested frameworks such as ITIL, CAF and AMM to name a few can be leveraged based on the objectives which can be unique to each enterprise. Hence, incorporate enough latitude to evaluate the necessity and the range of adoption. This will help in navigating from point A to point B seamlessly.

My journey from interior design to DevOps engineering began with a vision of a tech-driven future. I saw the potential of cloud, automation, and AI to revolutionize IT. My roadmap was clear: assess my skills, learn IT fundamentals, gain practical experience, network with experts, choose the right cloud, automate key tasks, integrate AI, track milestones, and never stop learning. Each step brought me closer to improved agility, scalability, reliability, security, innovation, and, most importantly, customer satisfaction. It was a transition fuelled by passion and a commitment to excellence in the ever-evolving IT landscape.

When executing any major operations like migration to cloud infrastructure, you want to start from the desired final product, and work your way backwards to identify the order of operations and the steps required to implement that final endpoint. Don't be afraid to push back on timelines - product and the business always want things done yesterday, but you need to ensure you have enough time incorporated to allow for unexpected delays in any project. Nothing ever goes according to plan, so plan for that.

In my pursuit of excellence in cloud, automation, and AI, I unwaveringly follow best practices and standards. I've embraced the DevOps approach, merging development and operations seamlessly, fostering collaboration, and accelerating innovation. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become my cornerstone, automating resource provisioning and configuration in the cloud, enhancing consistency, and minimizing errors. It's the blueprint for my efficiency. AI is the vigilant guardian, continuously monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing IT operations. With AI-powered tools, I'm proactive, not reactive, ensuring peak performance and minimizing downtime.

Whenever incorporating IaC, the first thing I would say is to pick a horse, and run with it. There are many different ways to implement IaC, using a variety of different tools. It is often VASTLY more complicated to convert IaC from one tool's code to another's. So, choose wisely and then *stick with that choice*.

IT operations teams are flag bearers of Day2 operations. Give enough latitude, upskill by investing in quality training resources, motivate by involving in decision making, and empower with collaborative mindset. To reference an experience - when scaling out of build operations of virtual infrastructure was strategic, multiple team members were upskilled with vendor sponsored bootcamps and training for the both on-shore and off-shore team members. Following that "Certification Jammin" sessions were organized every quarter to engage teams to prepare for certifications. Result was increase of certification rate, decrease in ticket resolution times, notwithstanding the new technologies staff was trained in.

Value experience. Be wary of "paper tigers". Certifications are great for exposing employees to new tools and offerings that they DO need to know to ensure proper migration, but the actual discipline of engineering the right infrastructure is not something easily learned without experience. Ensure your leads are mentoring effectively, that projects are leveraging the tools that your employees have trained up on, and that there's a progression path determined.

If you can effectively communicate to finance how cloud migration is going to generate revenue, you will never hear "no". Don't look at your job as simply cutting costs or saving money - those are the entry level assumptions. The idea here is that if you make your applications more widely available and more responsive, you *generate new business*. If you can show executive leadership how your strategy is going to make money, you will always get your funding.