Cloud migration: the tech is never the problem.

In fifteen years of migrations, I have never seen a project derail because of the tool. It derails because of what people refused to look at beforehand: the integrations, the data, the dependencies that no diagram documents.

Cloud has become a reflex. We migrate because the on-prem contract is up, because a committee decided, because a competitor did it. And we treat migration like a move: pack, transport, reconnect. Except a CX platform is not a cardboard box. It is a node of integrations — CRM, billing, WFM, ten-year-old in-house tools — and that is precisely where everything plays out.

The tech gets chosen in one meeting. The integration takes six months to understand.

Genesys, Amazon Connect, another vendor: the platform choice occupies 80% of committee time and 20% of actual risk. The reverse is true for integration. Nobody wants to fund the four weeks of mapping that reveal the screen-pop runs through a script no one maintains. So they skip it. And they pay dearly at cutover.

The case that stayed with me.

A European luxury leader — multi-site, near-99.99% availability requirements — wanted to move fast. Decision in March, Go-Live targeted for September. The platform was right, the team competent. But nobody had audited the dependencies between the legacy IVR and the CRM. Three critical applications were not cloud-ready. Production outages, customer escalations, Go-Live pushed back five months. The cost of the delay exceeded the cost of the audit that had been deemed unnecessary.

Four weeks of integration audit costs less than one week of failed Go-Live.

What I do before touching anything.

Before any technical decision, we map the ecosystem: which applications talk to the platform, in which direction, with what acceptable latency, and which ones fail if the migration slips. This map is not a comfort deliverable. It is what tells you whether September is viable, or whether it is a slide-deck fiction.

Cloud migration is not a technical project. It is a dependencies project. Whoever has mapped them before leaving arrives on time. The others explain in COPIL why the Go-Live is slipping.