“That, I’ve found, has been the biggest challenge. People are competent in their certain technologies and now they’re coming in and trying to figure out these new services. They, before, felt like experts. ‘I’m a storage architect. All I do is storage.’ In this world, that doesn’t work anymore. You have to know about storage and security and networking.”
Skills change
Stephen Orban, the head of enterprise strategy at AWS and the former CIO and global head of technology at Dow Jones and Co., said when he’s talking to enterprises about cloud migration, the single biggest sticking point is not at the executive level but with CIOs trying to get their teams to develop the skills they need to make the transition.
IT workers need to understand how to use the cloud. They need to be able to handle automation and DevOps, combining the role of developer with operations and other IT jobs. They also need to be able to work with big data and mobile.
“We don’t’ need someone who knows how to preserve bits,” said Notre Dame’s Chapple. “Our vendor does that. We don’t need capacity planning. We’ve got that. We need people who can take the building blocks — like virtual servers and elastic block stores — from the cloud and put them together. You need to put together the storage and the server and the network and DNS and security to create your IT service.”
Robert Mahowald, an analyst with IDC, said his firm’s enterprise surveys have found that there’s generally a 50% skills gap between where IT workers’ skills are today and where companies want them to be in two years.
“People who have had traditional roles will either be retrained, repurposed or reskilled,” saidMahowald.
At The Weather Company, Williams said, all 400 of its tech staffers are doing a different type of job today than they were before the company moved to the cloud.
All of them
“They play in the same place but with an entirely different set of skills,” said Williams. “All of them are now retrained or they’ve added to their skills or they are doing something different.”
Most of the changes the tech workers had to go through were at least eventually met with acceptance and sometimes excitement. Fewer than 10 of their IT people left the company because of the changes they were asked to make.
“Most folks, once they get past that, get excited about the change,” said Williams. “Some folks get frustrated and move on and that’s obviously unfortunate.”
Business dragging IT to the cloud
Another trend: There has been a switch-up in who actually is pushing for companies to move to the cloud.
In the past, many IT managers wanted to try the cloud with specific apps or services. At the same time, CEOs were hesitant to jump in, largely worried about security, accessibility and reliability issues.
Now, however, many business executives have gotten over those worries but IT workers have developed their own set of concerns about changing their skills and their jobs.
“Now that the cloud isn’t so new and scary, IT still wants to poke around but business is saying, ‘Now! Stop screwing around and get on the cloud!’ ” said Mahowald. “IT still wants to piecemeal it. They’re not taking the big step to build cloud-first, think cloud-first and build databases in the cloud. They’re still thinking about Band-Aids.”
He added that much of IT’s hesitance is increasingly political. It’s not about whether the tech will work or if it will benefit the company. It’s about the fear that the cloud is taking their jobs away.
That, according to Mahowald, is frustrating business executives.
At The Weather Company, Williams definitely has seen that switch. Luckily for him, he was already pushing hard toward the cloud so business and tech have been moving in the same direction.
“In our first two years, anytime we had conversations, the enterprise was saying, ‘No, no. I get it but I’ve got records and complex applications and we’re always going to run those on our own data centres,’ ” said Williams. “Then about a year ago, I started seeing the flip, where people weren’t telling me I’m crazy anymore. I was like, ‘It’s about time…’ Suddenly they were saying, ‘Let’s go all in.’ “
IT leaders say to help convince tech workers to move toward the cloud with more speed and less resistance, they need to talk openly with them about the new skills they will be gaining, the broader jobs they will be able to take on and the projects they will be able to do that they never had time for before.
“This is the history of IT,” said Chapple. “If you’re going to be in IT, you need to know you’re in a field that’s constantly changing. We’ve always had new tools at our disposal. The cloud is a larger scale change than we’ve experience in a number of years but it’s natural. You keep your skills current.”
Sharon Gaudin, IDG News Service
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers