Cloud Advocacy
The Cloud Ecosystem approaches advocacy holistically, providing customer support throughout the entirety of the Cloud Smart Journey with a focus on ensuring a positive tenant experience from a business and technical perspective while also collecting feedback to enhance the experience.
Email your questions to the Cloud Advocate at fcs-advocate@gsa.gov.
The Cloud Advocate Role
To enable this approach, Cloud Integration Shared Services (CISS) has established a Cloud Advocate role:
- Tenant engagement and escalation point-of-contact
- Coordinate the tenant intake process into the FCS ecosystem
- Ensure understanding and awareness of customer needs and business objectives
- Collaborate with stakeholders, product owners, product and service teams to efficiently transition between phases and appropriately leverage cloud services
- Collect tenant feedback to improve services, processes, and the overall experience
Cloud Advocate Impact
Cloud Ecosystem customers have benefited from a variety of improvements making an impact on the overall experience. As a result of the Cloud Advocacy approach, FCS has identified improvement in the following areas: Process, Service, Tenant Experience, and Cost.
Process Improvement Impacts**
- Dedicated Engineer Support Tenant Touchpoints and ChatOps - newly onboarded tenants now benefit from a dedicated engineer to interact with them regularly via Tenant Touchpoint meetings at a mutually established cadence, Chat Channels and email. These high-touch high-visibility outlets have enabled quick, hands on support for timely issue resolution and technical assistance
- Product Managers/Owners and Subject Matter Experts - consistently engaged throughout the Cloud Smart Journey which allows tenants to reach the best solution quickly with more accurate requirements and enables efficient problem solving as the journey continues
- Guided Training - Tenants transitioning to SRE in Phase 4 of the Cloud Smart Journey are guided through a training on self-service options, which has empowered tenants to problem solve independently and resulted in more timely issue resolution
- Retrospectives and Surveys - FCS is regularly obtaining feedback from tenants via retrospectives and quarterly tenant surveys. The information provided has allowed us to implement solutions (i.e.: Touchpoints, ChatOps, JSM implementation) to address tenant concerns and improve the overall experience
Service Improvement Impacts
- Product Specific Engineers - Embedded product specific engineers are currently being utilized, which is helping to improve accuracy and timeliness of ticket resolution. This has been particularly helpful with regard to Data Products and Data ProServ
- JIRA Service Management (JSM) Access Bulk Requests - JSM is the service tool for cloud related tickets. Access can be requested in bulk for new tenants creating significant time savings for tenants and also for the engineers that can distribute their time to other critical issues
Cost Improvement Impacts
- Integrated Award Environment (IAE)
- Overarching Tenant wide trusted advisor reports provided the ability to review various infrastructure components across multiple accounts and address actionable easy wins
- Realized efficiencies in cloud infrastructure resources usage and resource consolidation where applicable (i.e. Redshift consolidation, RDS consolidation)