Cloud technology brings new roles for IT
May 17, 2017
May 17, 2017
I’ve spent a lot of time recently with IT directors and staffs of major businesses. I’ve noticed that while all of their IT organizations have their own circumstances, hurdles and aspirations, they have certain things in common, too.
IT leaders are more than willing to discuss what cloud can do for their business.
They are uniformly smart people. And they agree in theory that cloud computing solutions can help them create an IT organization that is more—efficient, effective, agile, responsive, and just more whatever. Where their skepticism and fear come in is when the discussion shifts to retaining control during the cloud migration. IT leaders understand the “what” and “why” of the cloud; they stumble at the “how.”
I always take IT leaders’ concerns about cloud adoption seriously. They are legitimate, and they underpin the reality that a lot of these leaders live in. I need to understand them before I can convey what I truly believe (and have seen countless times): that the journey to cloud makes IT organizations more—not less—relevant, and less—not more--isolated.
Finally, a new control plane opens the “hearts and minds” of IT leaders.
I’ve found that a vision for a new control plane not only helps ease their minds, but also opens their minds to new cloud opportunities. It provides a high-level roadmap for change, and depicts how roles, processes and tools will evolve in an organization’s move to the cloud.
My vision for the new control plane:
Cloud migration brings a new set of roles for IT
Traditionally, IT leaders have a set of roles focused on activities such as incident management, application performance management and services management. These roles rely on certain tools to carry out their tasks and effectively manage ITIL and service assurance processes.
Once the cloud migration is under way, possibly with the assistance of a third-party provider’s App Owner, new roles appear.
These new resources—some of whom may come from the talent pool previously dedicated to service management—will rely on new tools such as the Accenture Cloud Platform or continuous improvement/continuous deployment approaches to optimize cost and drive new innovations. Middleware and an integrated service bus supports the new control plane, end to end.
Seeing the new landscape laid out this way can help IT leaders understand what a cloud migration might mean for them. Looking at the cloud through the lens of a new control plane helps them realize that the transition is not something to fear or resist, but something to celebrate. At the end of the day, embracing cloud computing technologies gives them greater, not less, control. And it puts them back in the driver’s seat, where they belong.