As enterprises are moving to the cloud, it is changing a whole lot more than just where companies’ data and services are sitting.
The emergence of the cloud is heralding a shift in the skills that IT workers need and the jobs they are doing. It is changing the entire culture inside IT departments.
Technology leaders talked about these changes during AWS’s recent re:Invent cloud-themed conference.
“The cloud is part of the evolution of IT,” said Mike Chapple, senior director for IT service delivery at the US University of Notre Dame. “People can’t be living in one particular technical silo anymore.”
The trend is also altering the balance of who is pushing to migrate to the cloud. IT often is no longer shepherding the cloud migration. Business executives are dragging IT into the cloud and tech leaders are finding themselves being forced to keep up.
How IT fits
Those shifts are starting with how IT sees itself fitting inside the business as a whole.
For some time now, IT managers have talked about aligning IT with the business side — understanding business needs and trying to meet them. Today, though, that idea is taking a step forward.
Since the cloud is enabling IT workers to offload a lot of their work, they are now able to focus on projects they simply had no time for before. And with the cloud, programmers are able to build and test their apps much faster since they do not have to wait for a server to be ready to use.
That means the business is getting their IT-related requests through much faster. It also means IT has more time to focus on the business and not just on keeping email up and tending to data stores.
“We’re having some very fundamental conversations,” said John Trujillo, assistant vice president of technology at Pacific Life Insurance. “I’m a technologist but I am in the business service business. We grew up being the rackers and stackers and the ones who tweaked the servers. The challenge now is to change that mindset from being a service provider to a service broker.”
“IT shouldn’t talk about aligning with business,” added Trujillo. “We have to be as much a part of the business as anyone else. It’s no longer about racking and stacking.”
Thinking like a start-up
At The Weather Company, the parent company behind The Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground, managers do not even use the term “IT department” anymore.
“We’re taking a whole new approach,” said Landon Williams, vice president of infrastructure architecture and services at The Weather Company. “We call it technology. The culture we wanted to have people in when they’re approaching decision-making is not to think like a legacy IT department, but to think like a start-up, next-gen department.”
The Weather Company simply does not want its technical staff to be locked into an old, traditional way of thinking about solving problems and advancing the business. A name change, it decided, was the best way to start making that happen.
Williams’ staff had to get their collective heads around the idea of going all-in with the cloud. It took them about two years to see that all the changes they were going through ultimately was going to make their lives easier.
“It takes a while for everybody to get their heads around the scariness of change,” he said. “As with any evolution anywhere, you’ve got the ingrained idea to go with the way something has always been done. To approach folks who are digging their heels in, we tell them, ‘Remember this is about business and revenue and not the technology you’ve liked.’ “
Working with the cloud simply pushes or pulls you into new ways of thinking about how you get your job done.
Bob Micielli, director of enterprise technology services for King County, Washington, was taken by surprise when business executives did not put up the biggest roadblocks to moving to the cloud.
Those roadblocks, he said, came from his own people.
“The biggest pushback was from my own staff,” said Micielli, who saved the county $1 million by moving from tape backup to a cloud-based backup, as well as $300,000 in operating costs year-over-year.
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