MAP without a DSI: who owns the migration when nobody is full-time IT
With no full-time IT director, a MAP migration is still perfectly doable. What is not doable is leaving the decisions without an owner: AWS and the partner carry the case and the delivery, but scope, the freeze, cutover sign-off and the bill afterwards stay on your side, and each one needs a name against it.
The short answer: a name, not a job title
A MAP case does not ask for a salaried head of IT. In practice it asks for a named person on the customer side who can arbitrate: approve the scope submitted, hold the schedule committed to, and sign off every cutover.
AWS reviews the case and covers part of the cost. The partner builds it, designs the target and runs the move — the role we hold, with Premaccess, an AWS Select partner. What neither can do on your behalf is settle what stops, what waits, and what moves first.
Fractional IT leadership is enough to hold that role, as long as it comes with a written mandate. A supplier executing without a mandate does not own the decision: it is a team waiting for an answer.
The four decisions nobody can delegate
Scope. Which applications move, in what order, and which ones stay deliberately where they are. A scope decided by the supplier is a scope nobody will defend in a steering meeting.
The freeze. During a migration wave, functional changes to the application involved stop. Somebody has to be able to say no to the business request landing on Tuesday, and stand behind it.
Cutover sign-off. The go / no-go on every wave: tests passed, backups verified, rollback plan written down. It is not a technical decision, it is a risk decision.
The bill afterwards. Once the migration is done, cloud consumption becomes a live cost line that moves month to month. With no owner it drifts, and the funding obtained will have paid for the removal van and little else.
Who can hold those decisions
The founder alone. Workable on a small scope, untenable beyond it: arbitrating means having read the inventory, not only the summary.
An internal IT manager. Often the right person, rarely available: the migration is added on top of day-to-day operations, which do not stop.
Fractional IT leadership. This is the setup that holds up best in companies with no head of IT: a few days a month, an explicit mandate, and the same person from the assess phase through to watching the bill. It is what our Fractional CIO engagement covers.
One caution applies to all three, ours included: whoever arbitrates the scope and whoever invoices the delivery should not be the same signature. When one firm holds both roles, ask for the governance mandate to be written separately, with its own milestones and its own right to say no.
What happens when nobody owns it
The symptom is never an outage, it is a slowdown. Questions stay open from one steering meeting to the next. An application drops out of scope because a business team said no in a room, and the effect on the committed schedule goes unmeasured.
Yet the schedule in a MAP case is not indicative: what is committed at review becomes binding, and a scope that empties out along the way weakens the basis the funding was calculated on. The detail sits in our guide on the MAP programme.
The other symptom arrives later: double running. The old infrastructure stays powered on because nobody dares sign its shutdown. It is the most systematically forgotten cost item, and it is paid every month — we break it down in what a migration really costs.
The minimum setup that holds
A sponsor on the leadership team. One person, not a committee. They do not have to be technical; they have to be able to settle a conflict between two business units.
An owner of the IT decision. Internal or fractional, with a written mandate: scope, freeze, go / no-go, target budget.
A referent per application. Somebody who knows what the application actually does, who uses it, and what breaks if it stops overnight. It is the scarcest resource and the least anticipated one.
A short weekly slot. Thirty minutes, a fixed agenda: what moved, what is blocked, what gets decided today. Migrations that drift are the ones whose steering meeting is called only when there is a problem.
Governance does not end at cutover
The day the last wave lands, the project organisation dissolves and the subject becomes an orphan again. That is precisely when the cloud bill starts to live: sizing to adjust to real load, non-production environments to shut down, managed services to substitute where relevant.
Those decisions are monthly and they last for years. They do not need a full-time hire; they need a recurring slot, a target budget and a person who opens the invoice. A company with no head of IT can hold that perfectly well, provided it was planned before the cutover and not six months after.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need an in-house head of IT to file a MAP case?
No. A case is reviewed on scope, target and schedule; it does not ask for a salaried IT director. What it does take is a counterpart on the customer side able to approve scope and schedule, then sign off the cutovers. Fractional IT leadership holds that role when the mandate is written down.
Can the partner not simply carry all of it?
It carries the case, the design and the delivery, which is already most of the load. It cannot arbitrate on your behalf what belongs to your business: which application can stop overnight, which team is waiting for a release, which risk you accept at cutover. A partner willing to settle that alone exposes you twice.
How much time a month does it take?
It depends on scope, and we publish no standard figure: ten applications do not demand the same presence as a full datacentre. What stays constant is the rhythm: a short weekly slot during the waves, then a monthly review of the bill. Irregularity is what costs, not volume.
Who watches the cloud bill once the migration is over?
That is the question most often skipped while the case is being built. Funding covers the move, not the operations that follow. Name, as early as the assess phase, the person who will open the invoice every month and is allowed to switch off what is unused, or consumption drifts for a full financial year before anyone looks at it.
Go further
This maps to our AWS Migration, MAP-funded offer, or talk it through with the founder.
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