Foreseeable hybrid
Cloud evangelists have long since conceded that the foreseeable future is hybrid, meaning more often than not the continuing use of those serviceable assets rather than any fine distinction between public and private and other suspended vapours (metaphorically speaking, of course). Some of us, old dogs who have travelled hard roads, may bring up the point that cloud computing shares one universal characteristic with traditional data processing back to the mainframe — it actually runs on hardware.
In fact without singling out any one global public cloud provider, photos in the public domain of giant desert data centres with gazillions of servers in stacked shipping containers do not engender any more confidence than that quietly humming glass-fronted cabinet over in the corner. Scale and redundancy, once regarded as over-engineering, can mask quite basic deficiencies in design and performance, as every experienced IT engineer will testify.
Back up at the C-suite, it becomes clear that the CIO has to combine innovation with care and maintenance. That includes both the existing investment in the systems estate and the actual IT department. Its people and skills set are also an asset and investment, threatened in exactly the same ways by both emerging technology and obsolescence if not upgraded or renewed. Some so-called legacy systems are actually mission-critical, as major banking institutions on these islands have demonstrated publicly on several embarrassing occasions in recent years. That pair of slightly nerdy and apparently unambitious DBAs (Oracle or SAP or Sybase or whatever) may, with cold objectivity, be more essential to the organisation than the CIO — at least in terms of daily operations.
“Scale and redundancy, once regarded as over-engineering, can mask quite basic deficiencies in design and performance, as every experienced IT engineer will testify”
The whole point, of course, is that the much-discussed changing roles and new demands apply to the entire IT Department as well as the CIO. As the visible face of ICT, the CIO’s leadership role and vision are to the forefront in the encounter with the new market and technology and cultural realities. But the support team, the full set of in-house skills resources, surely has to follow the same path? Arguably, in this changing ICT environment, any ambitious executive should really be a mini-CIO, integrating with the business yet with sufficient technology skills to advise appropriately and accurately.
Beyond tech
There is a clear argument here for upskilling and developing the team members whose credentials and experience are purely technical. For a start, the purely technical tasks and services can be bought in from providers but current staff have a depth of invaluable domain knowledge that simply cannot be. In that light, skills renewal certainly beats redundancy from any enlightened corporate point of view. Recent economic circumstances undoubtedly meant that any natural attrition in IT Department numbers was quietly welcomed. Now that times have changed, proven people deserve care and nurture.
CIOs have to present and persuade and be advocates for ICT. Not necessarily for specific solutions so much as the possibilities for better business in market innovation or reducing costs. But surely the other IT team members, especially the more senior, share all of that? In fact they could well be even more effective in a practical way as they deal on a daily basis with their peers and the systems users throughout the organisation. That argues for communications skills development, for example, even ahead of tech refresher courses. Every IT department has some technicians who are more popular than others because they can explain the issues as well as fix them. That is a talent worth cultivating.
Our marketing brethren and sistren sometimes remind themselves of the classic doctrine that the existing customer base often offers more possibilities for new business at lower costs than tackling the wider market. Might not the same apply to the skills and talent base of the current IT department?
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