In terms of technical development ahead of a CloudSuite implementation, let’s discuss some of the things you can do today to prepare. The first thing is to figure out all those technical development items that you're currently maintaining and make sure you understand not just why they're there in the first place, but also what business processes they enable. Are they going to be required for CloudSuite? Do they represent a unique business requirement that CloudSuite probably isn't going to meet out of the box? Or is it something where you can consider adapting a business process to better fall in line with how CloudSuite works, rather than trying to customize it?
Most organizations already have some level of rights list or tech artifact, so it’s a matter of flushing that out and making sure that you know not only that the token exists, but why it exists and what it's trying to accomplish. More than that, you can start mapping out what the future state tool is going to be. If it's a 4GL interface, it's not going to be one in the future so you can give some t-shirt size on the level of complexity in the meantime.
If you haven't started a project and you're not ready to start redeveloping things, what can you do? You start documenting what you have and start triaging. Figure out what the new technology is that this item will map up to, as well as how big it might be. You need to know if it is something small or if it will take a lot of time, so that the information can be added up and that's tell you how many developer hours you need by skill. Then you can start looking at your staffing and figure out how to meet skill and resourcing requirements.
Once you have that list, you're going to go a little bit further start whittling it down to the most important actions items. There's so much work that is required just to get core interfaces up and running. There's not going to be a lot of space for anything that's optional or nice to have. This can be a hard pill to swallow for organizations that have been on Lawson for 20 years, they're running an extremely stable, extremely fine-tuned machine and it’s been optimized over a lot of time. We're moving to a whole new system that is not going to be quite as optimized right out of the box. It's natural that it's going to take a couple of years to get back to that state you were at, so you have to be okay with being a little uncomfortable at first.
