Financial Operations for Cloud World

The Opportunity:

Much like the Council of Elrond from Lord of the Rings (but with much less magnificent beards), a work study, including all major services that could benefit from a financial overview service, was called. The group would be divided into three working groups each with their own UX researcher, UX designer and members of OCI services. We would approach finops with two guiding questions for each group to explore; "How might we define the ownership of the specific tenancy to enable reporting by the org?" and "How might we provide a budget burndown so that owners can see how they are doing against budget". The Cost of Cloud Council was formed:

Being the UX Light in Our Cost of Cloud Cave:

I was assigned to be the UX lead in one of the three workgroups. My role was to help document the requests and observations that we all came up with. Importantly, I was also meant to be a passive observer letting the UX researcher guide the group exercises and not influence the wants and needs of the group.

My task was to gather this new valuable information and condense it into actionable items. I created two categories; navigation locations, and features. Using the navigation points we were able to put together a very brief outline of what a new finops service might look like and the features it had to offer.

Compiling the Service Structure:

The next task was to take the loose wireframe of the product the workshop had come up with and align it to the goals we defined the product to have. Working with the project manager we came up with "Understanding Usage & Costs", "Usage Optimization", "Price Optimization", and "Organizational Alignment". I created this chart to explain where we were headed.

Iterating on the Steps for Activation:

Once we had acceptance from the Cost of Cloud members on what the service needed to do, we started the iteration process of all the steps required to turn the service on. The net new portion of the service was going to be a monitoring dashboard where users could see what and where their money was being spent. But to gather all that information, we needed to activate the monitoring of those services. Below is an example of one of the iterations I took the product through.

Upper Management Interest:

News of our workshop's success and the prevailing product that we designed was making the rounds at the watercooler. Upper management asked to see a demo of the new "Cost of Cloud" product and was delighted by what we were able to come up with. Utilizing many services that already existed we only needed to create our new dashboard. Once the monitoring was set up, all sorts of impressive new statistics were made available to tenancy owners. This was true for internal and external customers.

Cloud World Demo:

The Cost of Cloud product was a great success and upper management saw the potential to show this work at Oracle's Cloud World. It was a product that showed OCI cared about their customers and would alert them to superflous spending and resources not being utilized. Being a tool that is available for internal users too meant that the savings we were offering our customers were also available to the company. Finding abandoned tenancies and non-performing resources meant that they could all be reallocated back to the resource pool, ultimately lower the cost of doing business!

The business impact:

After the workshop, our goals were clear. We needed to:

• Enhance visibility, visualization, and optimization
• Develop a modular approach aligned with diverse user groups
• Craft solutions for shared cost efficiency
• Enhance data integration and management

Developing a modular approach and looking at data integration, we were able to use an exisiting product and repurpose it to fit our needs. Using our tags system and guided journey system, showing cost efficiency and optimization recomendations was a breeze. Opportunities for future enhancement with AI was also on the table.