Opinions
The Cloud and organizational change
Rens Troost – CTO and Partner
OVERVIEW: The cloud is less about technology, and more about understanding and mastering new operating models. Step one for the CIO is to work out what the cloud means to you and your organization.
While the cloud is often discussed in purely technological terms, its real significance and its most profound challenges are related to the new operating models that it makes possible. The cloud is a long term play that starts now. It is the thin end of a wedge of change that will transform the role of the CIO, from a manager of resources, to a broker of services. To understand the many and complex issues involved, consider this scenario:
One of your brightest, most successful product line executives invents a new cloud-powered service to clients that transforms your company’s ability to capture a growing market. As a CIO, you are challenged by the CEO to make it happen. the executive is skeptical about your ability to deliver in the timescales that are needed because of long and painful experience, and is actively talking with external service providers who promise a quick turnaround and will operate it as well. The CEO has some sympathy for your concerns about the risks involved with the vendor, so he has graciously given you the opportunity to meet or beat their time scales.
Here come the problems
You don’t have the skills in house needed to do this, or more accurately, you really cannot divert your top people from their current roles, even if you and they wanted to. You hire some new hotshots to quickly set up an infrastructure on Amazon EC2 and start prototyping the application using Ruby. After the cloud team gets off to a quick start, the meetings begin with middle managers that control the systems with which the new application will be integrated. They have enough to do already and threaten the project with “malicious cooperation”. The risk department just says no to the new cloud infrastructure because they do not understand it. Your top people are struck with “cloud envy”. They grumble and wonder if they should look for new job where they can use their advanced talents and gain cloud skills. If you are lucky, the CEO comes in and screams at everyone to allow the new application to launch. But even if that happens, you are left with a mess.
To avoid this fate, you must learn what the cloud means to you and your organization and start changing and building skills to make effective use of cloud resources. This does not mean writing a big cheque for a private cloud. That may someday make sense, but not until you really understand what you want. This does not mean outsourcing cloud development to a systems integrator, which will not create flexibility or transform your organization.
Here is what you need to be doing right now. First, take a look at the low hanging fruit and perform safe experiments. Development and test environments are a great, safe start, so are batch applications that are bursty in their use of resources. Answer these questions: What skills are needed to support these experiments? Whose job descriptions will change? How will automation change the organization? What tools do end users need to manage the resources they now control? Which controls are actually adding value? What policies should be enforced? What standards can be suggested? What will go away? What new departments will be needed? The answers to these questions are highly idiosyncratic. They depend on your business more than cloud vendor capabilities.
The overall conclusion is clear – start planning for organizational changes and get ahead of the trend. Otherwise, one day, your CEO will walk into your office as the company is buffeted by some cloud-powered innovation, and ask you pointedly, “What are we going to do about this?” It is far better to go into his office with an answer to the same question.
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