We are well over the threshold into a new era of computing and communications. It has transformed our traditional and familiar structures of CPU and disks and cases or cabinets. Only screens and keyboards survive, now in almost unimaginable variety, and of course the mouse or other cursor controller when needed. It’s ‘The Cloud’, or at least that is the term the industry came up with something like a decade ago, presumably since ‘Internet computing’ or ‘Web computing’ would have had unacceptable connotations given the flakiness of connectivity in most of the world. It has led to terms and headlines that stretch the metaphor beyond language or good sense, like ‘cloud as platform’ or ‘getting to grips with the cloud’. Note how seldom the other attributes of cloud are invoked, like vapour, mist, storms or indeed thunder clouds-not conducive to confidence in cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service.
The salient point is that in today’s world more and more of the actual computing and data storage is ‘in the cloud’. Conceptually, it is in many respects just a move on from more established forms of centralised computing with remote access. It could well be referred to as advanced server-based computing and it actually is, behind the foggy cloud term, data centre computing. It could also happily be called ‘remote computing’. The computer is where the apps run: everything else is connectivity and interface.
External structure
One clear consequence of moving to that external computing structure-and bearing firmly in mind that it will be a long time before any organisation has dispensed with local LANs and servers entirely-is that the responsibilities and required skills in the internal IT department are changing fundamentally. Whether you are the CIO or CTO or IT Director/Manager or just the person who got the responsibilities assigned, understanding the Cloud, pathfinding through the fog, navigating around the multiple service offerings have all risen to the top of your priority list.
As this new generation of IT is beginning to mature, now embracing all forms of communication in global IP.x connectivity, all experts point to changing requirements in managing and delivering ICT services. Changing skills requirements as technology develops has been with us forever. This time around we are actually witnessing one of those genuine paradigm shifts. “The skills and even the organisation structure for ICT within the organisation are going to change dramatically,” says Chris Weitz, director of Deloitte Consulting and leader of the firm’s global cloud practice. The emphasis has moved or is moving to the business side, he believes, with the key focus on innovation.
Service broker
“Change and flexibility, new applications and functionality for organisations and users are all easier and faster to deploy in a cloud environment. Within the organisation, the traditional IT function is becoming more and more like a services broker,” Weitz believes. “The IT functions will retain and develop expertise, but with a heavy emphasis on service and supplier selection, negotiation, contracts and SLA monitoring. All software is becoming hardware agnostic and in many respects the hypervisor is the new operating system. As for applications, we certainly will no longer buy them in a box from a vendor and deploy. All software will tend towards the SaaS model.”
Weitz also asserts that innovation will occur at the edge, following the many proven examples in online consumer services that have demonstrated how they can be deployed rapidly and lightly. “There is huge scope in this area for new skills in identifying and exploiting innovative options, especially user-oriented, consumer style services and functionality that has never been used previously in a business environment. It is well proven internationally that the businesses that thrive are those that can innovate. They also cope well with rapid change.”
Within the organisation and in partners close to it, Weitz says, there will remain plenty of scope for technologists to create innovative functionality. In a cloud environment and with new and changing platforms, specific skills already showing value include Ruby and Python other high level programming technologies.
Decisive decade
We are now in a ‘Decisive Decade’ when the acceleration of ideas will have transformed the workplace by 2020. Sharing and developing ideas and collaborating online will dramatically change the productivity and creativity of employees. That is the view of Neil Delaney, Google head of EMEA business for SMEs. It is based on the major international study by the Future Foundation for Google Enterprise “The Decisive Decade” which established among other things that there is already a proven 81% correlation between collaboration and innovation. “That is the future of work. People will work closely together but in virtual teams, remotely, with smarter systems and tools that are developing all the time. That poses challenges in managing work and workers which will in fact be critical to the business or organisation of any kind as it moves through what will clearly be a definitive transformation.”
The role of the IT function will inevitably change as will the required skills, Delaney points out. “Until recently many IT people were spending 80% of their efforts in effectively just ‘keeping the lights on’ and ensuring the operations of equipment and systems. “In this new era IT people will have a new focus, enabling and supporting that collaborative working, which will be mostly if not entirely cloud-based. Enlightened CIOs are already seeing that without the burdens of legacy infrastructure cloud offers greater choice and flexibility for the organisation. Data is not harnessed to one location or set of devices and neither are applications. But it is important that the IT department will still be in control, but with a changed role and different skill sets.”
Business contextual social networking tools will become the norm and more varied and rich business networks will be built by individuals as collaboration accelerates, Delaney says. This could pose challenges for businesses as they try to keep employees focussed on core purposes and it now seems clear that major elements of the IT and HR functions will become integrated as human interaction in collaborative systems becomes the key to innovation and business success.
Innovation responsibility
“Professionals are already anticipating this change,” he says, “That Decisive Decade study found that 31% of the IT managers surveyed believe the CIO will take on more responsibility for innovation in the future. On the HR side, 34% of HR staff agree they will need to learn new skills to foster and manage a sense of corporate community because of the new collaborative technologies that are emerging. The companies that will compete and win out through the next decade of innovation will be those that are early to embrace online collaborative technologies and these new ways of thinking.”
The era of cloud computing is bringing its own complexities and challenges, starting with the fact that it is by no means ‘one size fits all’, according to Ian Lucey, CEO of Lucey Technology. “There are simplistic concerns about security that still hold back some organisations, but it is becoming more recognised that security is a major concern globally in this online world and cloud computing is not inherently more or less dangerous that what we have been doing so far. We have embraced e-commerce, for example, but recent surveys suggest that about 70% of our Irish web portals are not PCI compliant in security terms, and that is largely with traditional architecture.”
Lucey points to examples like Microsoft e-mail and BPOS and other online services which offer SMEs levels of functionality, and security, that they would struggle to put in for themselves. “Other online services, probably cloud-based if we really need to care, will earn the same level of trust as simple business practicality drives market acceptance. In that SME in Ireland today, the guy responsible for ICT has to grasp the principles and know enough about cloud to understand what specific services can bring to the business. That will include choosing and buying services and understanding how they will fit together. Managing those intermediaries will become the important skill set.”
The same will apply in larger organisations, Lucey says, with the very significant development that choices of service provider or application can and will be made by business functions or departments rather than the CIO or ICT specialists. “A good example is that successful Irish HRlocker system for employee records and other administration, which is clearly a HR department decision that requires minimal advice from IT because it needs no in-house support to run.”
As for the skill sets needed in-house for the future, Ian Lucy is inclined to suggest that a good candidate for IT manager should be someone who is not afraid to talk him/herself out of a job! “Organisations of any scale need people who think strategically about what is needed, the direction of development and progress and above all, sensible innovation. The IT function is no longer about hiring a bunch of certified professionals-who will continue to have more than sufficient scope in larger organisations and service providers and consultants-it is about informed leadership and managing relationships.”
Whatever about the terminology, and all of our interviewees agreed that ‘cloud’ has not really proven fit for purpose, this new generation of computing is nothing short of ‘a fantastic revolution’ in the words of Microsoft’s Josh Holmes. He bears the great title of Architect Evangelist, a geography-independent role he has been carrying out from a Microsoft Ireland base since March, working principally with developers and software designers here. “Although it is truly a revolution, the cloud is not going to deliver all of our wildest imaginings overnight. One of the key things to understand is that it is generic, so there is always going to be a need for specialisation and localisation to shape the value to the needs of the organisation and even the individual user. In fact the need to know and understand your own business when making decisions is probably even greater than ever before.”
So the day to day jobs in the IT department are not simply going to go away but they are changing. Some will move out of the organisation to service providers, Holmes says. “Others will develop the skills to decide what and when to move to the cloud for the advantages it will bring, then following through on those decisions by managing the service providers. There will still be a need to keep monitoring the pulse of the business and its applications and to implement change.”
Cloud amenable
He points out also that there are still major sectors and industries and ICT functions in them that are not, or not yet, amenable to cloud infrastructure. “We all want to make payments and carry on business online, for example, but the PCI standards don’t allow for cloud and the certificates are still at the hardware level. In the USA the healthcare sector is bound by HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] but there are there are compliance issues in relation to cloud. With the FDA and secure retention of masses of data for long periods, on the other hand, cloud is ideal.”
The changing roles and challenges for in-house ICT people led one CIO of a large corporation to begin a seminar recently with “CIO might now stand for Career Is Over,” although the sheer transformation of the role was the point he was emphasising. The anecdote is recounted by Jason Ward, country manager of EMC, who added that in this new era of cloud computing ICT is almost entirely a set of commodity services. “The concept is innovation, not in huge steps but in constant change to meet new challenges in the market, in competition and in user and consumer demands. There are changing architectures and competencies on which that innovation will depend. So for example the traditional DBA role and SQL skills have given way to higher level understanding of virtualisation and open source and Ruby and how to constantly develop new and better functionality in a world that believes anywhere, any time is normal service.”
Ward points out that EMC has recognised for some years that cloud-specific skills requirements will be important. It introduced the first professional certifications last year in cloud architecture, virtualised infrastructure and related areas. Last month it announced a joint initiative with its long-time technology partner Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) to develop the world’s first Masters and undergraduate degree programmes in cloud computing. “EMC recognised a paradigm shift in technology with the advent of cloud computing. As industry leaders, we decided to harness our knowledge and expertise in this space to help ensure the availability of a pool of graduates to support Ireland’s growth and leadership in the cloud computing field.”
When cloud skills are specifically embraced by an academic institution it can be accepted that this new generation of ICT has reached at least the first stage of maturity. From a national point of view, this can be recognised as a truly important Irish ‘first’.
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