# The Cloud Operating Model journey
<a name="com-journey"></a>

The Vision Document has clarified your target state, but you must understand where you are in your cloud adoption journey to connect the vision to your current capabilities, and then understand the next steps. We have found that many customers focus on where they want to go, but it can be hard to see what the first step should be on that journey.

After the **Envision** stage, the AWS CAF defines three more phases:
+ **Align**: Focus is on identifying capability gaps across the six AWS CAF perspectives (business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations), identifying cross-organizational dependencies, and surfacing stakeholder concerns and challenges.
+ **Launch**: Focus is on delivering pilot initiatives in production and on demonstrating incremental business value. Pilots should be highly impactful. If and when they are successful, they will help influence future direction.
+ **Scale**: Focus is on expanding production pilots and business value to desired scale and ensuring that the business benefits associated with your cloud investments are realized and sustained.

Because the aim of AWS CAF is to improve your cloud readiness, we will add another phase after the **Scale** phase:
+ **Optimize**: Focus is on continually revisiting and improving the end solution to deliver additional business benefits.

Using these stages together with the AWS COM Framework helps you identify the capabilities that are important to you at each point in time. For example, if you are in the **Launch** phase, you might be more interested in the *Architecture and Patterns* capability than the *Resource/Estate Management* capability, which is more relevant during the **Scale** phase.

You carry out specific activities at each stage. For example, in the **Align **phase, you identify the capabilities you currently have and maturity level, then determine which capabilities you need to focus on first. If you are in the **Launch** phase, identifying pilot teams to develop the next level of maturity will be important. This requires planning, so we recommend that you define a roadmap.