The FT's Mark Barnes on the art of selling Cloud Only to the business

Barnes used Nudge Theory and EAST to rid the Financial Times of its remaining infrastructure burden

It's hard to be original in the web age, as Mark Barnes, technical officer for foundations services at the FT, discovered.

"I genuinely thought I was some kind of visionary. I thought I was a genius," he admitted in a keynote presentation at Computing's Deskflix Cloud event this week.

"Then I Googled the phrase and of course, lots of other people had already used it."

The phrase in question was "cloud only" and the year was 2017. An early cloud adopter, the FT already had a number of services running in AWS, but progress had largely ground to a halt and the publisher was left with a halfway house system, which compared with pure public cloud was expensive and time-consuming to run and maintain. In many cases the hardware in the two remaining UK data centres was ageing and becoming a security liability. The trouble is, inertia had set in.

The core team were convinced that cloud only - stripping every single system out of the data centres so that no management overhead remained - was the way forward: but how to communicate it to the rest of the company?

We had the reasons - the security, the money and the liability - and a snappy name, so all we had to do was sell it

First thing was to tweak Barnes' tag line, turning "Cloud Only" into "Cloud Only 2020", which as well as being original now had the additional benefit of a target date, he said. "So, we had the reasons - the security, the money and the liability - and now we had a snappy name for it too. So all we had to do was sell it."

To create and propagate effective messages the FT team leans on three pillars: Clarity, Communication and Empathy.

First Clarity: "You need to explain very clearly what it is, why you want to do it, and also why now. And what's the finish line? How will you know when you're done?" Barnes explained.

"Then there's communication. There is a need to do far more than you initially think you need, and use as many channels as possible, and simple messages."

While the web can put us all back in our box when it comes to originality, it is undoubtedly fantastic for getting a message across and opening up new channels. Barnes said the team made full use of email, Slack, internal sites - as well as more old-fashioned methods such as sticking posters in the kitchen and other communal spaces. "Don't underestimate things like posters, they may seem like old media, but they are surprisingly effective."

The third pillar, Empathy means understanding how the message will be received by the different people who see it.

A former student of Cognitive Science, Barnes and his team used techniques like Nudge Theory and the EAST Framework (Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely) in his efforts to get the message across.

"Easy means remove any blockers we had trying to get teams to change. Also, we wanted to make it attractive to make it useful for them, make them know that they understand the benefits." Barnes explained.

"Making it social means finding a way to get public commitments because people are simply more likely to stick to public commitments, and also find ways to compare progress, so that you can see how other people are doing. Finally, timely, that's about using the right time to communicate so they will take it in, not when somebody is snowed under."

Barnes made it his business to attend as many high-level meetings as possible to spread the word, and to ensure the core message was getting through, he leaned on the advice of technical director for enterprise services Greg Cope.

"We repeated 'Cloud First 2020' a lot. Greg said ‘repeat it until you hear enough people saying it back to you'.

"Now we needed a metric to see how we were doing against this cloud only goal and deadline, we needed to measure it. Once again, we believe that simple metrics work best."

The metric used was an ‘instance count' - each server or switch, or chunk of storage or even VM being an ‘instance', and the goal being to lower this number to zero by the end of 2020.

"This gave us an opportunity to gamify the process so that people could see how they were doing," said Barnes.

Ultimately the goal was achieved and, despite Covid, the data centre infrastructure is all but gone, ending with a socially distanced glass of champagne in a car park outside the now empty Watford facility in winter.

"I thought we would tip over into 2021 if I'm honest, but thanks to the very good engineers at the FT, we managed to hit it at the end of the day, which was brilliant," said Barnes.

Barnes' Deskflix video presentation will be available on demand on Computing shortly.