My recent article on Amazon.com and their cloud division’s focus on technology to the exclusion of any customer-centric digital strategy raised many eyebrows. After all, don’t cloud and digital go hand in hand? To explore this question I took a close look at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which split into two companies last year: 21st Century Fox, which retains the film, television, cable, and satellite businesses, and the refocused News Corp., responsible for print newspapers.
The cloud, in fact, was instrumental in this separation. “21st Century Fox had one year to change, working under a deadline,” explains Rich Roseman, formerly the CIO of 21st Century Fox, who led the IT side of the split. “IT, HR, finance, tax, real estate, etc. – all had to be separated.” The secret to his success? “We took a $71 billion global media company to the cloud.”
Standing up the New News Corp.
While the phone hacking scandal to hit News Corp. in the UK certainly contributed to the chaos within the company, their decision to split off the newspaper business from the rest of the company resulted more from the different forces of digital transformation hitting the two types of business.
Murdoch and other executives saw the new 21st Century Fox as the growth part of the business, while News Corp, now the name of the legacy newspaper business, would be left to more or less fend for itself in an industry in decline. To this end, they set an aggressive deadline to split the two companies.
Roseman and his team made the ambitious decision to move the newspaper business to the public cloud. “We had to stand up all the apps for News for the foreseeable future,” Roseman says. “This was our best opportunity to deploy cloud. It was green field. Why would we invest in people and technology now?”
Instead, the pay-as-you-go model of the cloud made sense for multiple reasons – although cost savings wasn’t at the top of the list. “Cloud was never sold internally as delivering cost savings, even though now it does. It was sold on speed and flexibility,” Roseman explains. “We implemented a total cloud deployment for the publication business because of the uncertainty of the future.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/11/25/cloud-greases-digital-transformation-wheels-at-news-corp/.
Rich Roseman will be speaking on “Moving a $71 Billion Media Company to the Cloud” at the NexGen Cloud Conference & Expo in San Diego on December 4 – 5.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Mitchell Hall.
