Enterprise Architecture Initiative
Overarching problem
Context
Two days of mapping and creating a user flow to target one of GCP's most common problem: Proliferation of Billing Accounts.
Mapping and proposing new approach to expedite the custom deal process
The problem
Up until 2019 GCP customers weren't equipped with billing tools e.g. billing account overview, reporting, credits, pricing etc. so they could understand their cloud spend.
In order to get to this understanding, customers started creating more billing accounts and associate their projects to those billing account in order to slice & dice & filter and to export their data to external tools so it'll allow them to analyze their spend.
This of course solved a problem but at the same time created multiple other problems:
Problem #1: When a Google Cloud Salesperson is contacted by a customer they don't always know which account will be used in order to associate the newly purchased services with it.
Problem #2: When a customer signs a custom deal with GCP, the Operations team often associate the undesired billing account to the custom deal.
Problem #3: When a customer creates a new billing account they would normally break numerous settings such as Permissions, Security, Networking and a lot more.
The Challenge
Google Cloud is consisted of 120+ different systems, 200+ teams 10,000+ employees.
Collaboration is high but with this amount of people it's impossible to keep track of everything that is happening around you.
Teams have quarterly / annual goals, adding more efforts to these teams puts a lot of pressure on their delivery goals.
Impact
The outcome from the two days workshop, was a large user flow, getting us closer to understand what would a Data-Model would look like.
When Salespeople get a lead for a potential sale, they are able to keep track of who is the real customer on the other side and to be able to claim this sale to their quarterly/annual bonus and compensations.
