IT organizations in the cloud

With all the talk about the technological and financial aspects to the cloud, there seems to be surprisingly little about the organizational implications of shifting services into the cloud.  If you don't have as many servers, do you need so many systems administrators?  What about software developers or quality assurance people?

The easy, but not necessarily best, answer is eliminating those positions (and therefore the employment of those people).  While that is perhaps tempting, a better approach is to consider what roles you'll need to best manage and support your business needs as the IT environment evolves, and then match the smart people on your team to those roles.

Reconsidering the IT mindset

Moving services (or establishing new services) into the cloud is like writing software for the iPad or Android - it requires a very different mindset to manage properly.  In particular, a cloud-based service or product is thought to be very easy to support and very fast to turn on.  In addition, cloud service providers are constantly releasing new features, driving demand for those features to be enabled in your environment.  As a result, end-users' expectations of IT responsiveness for support, changes, and new features will only increase as services are moved to the cloud.  Moreover, if IT manages cloud as it has other technologies, end-users are more capable than ever at going around IT to get what they need - indeed, now they can just sign up for a service over the Internet and get people using the service without IT even knowing about it.

To avoid this, IT needs to become more proactive than ever at driving service management to the end-users.  IT needs to effectively sell itself as the best channel for acquiring cloud services because it understands both the business and the technology better than anyone else.  This isn't a new concept - IT has had to become increasingly business-focused and customer-facing over the past decade.  What is new is the ease of acquiring IT services without the IT department's involvement.

Roles and redeployment

The odds are high that your IT environment will move incrementally (and likely not fully) into the cloud.  As such, your existing applications and infrastructure people will still need to continue supporting the data center and in-house applications.  At the same time, you should start to shift some of your people toward the following roles that will enable IT to become more of an asset to the company for both cloud and in-house services:

• Service Desk- On a day-in-day-out basis, end-users will continue to work most with the Service Desk team.  In addition, the ease of configuration often provided in cloud services means that more tasks can be moved to the Service to improve first-call resolution and overall customer (and job) satisfaction.  Consider augmenting the traditional service desk analysts with application specialists who can serve as subject matter experts and points of escalation for support.
• Business Analyst- It is increasingly crucial that IT understands business needs, which are rapidly changing as customer demand shifts and technologies improve.  Rather than wait for the business to declare their needs, engage directly with each department through frequent meetings and hallway discussions to make sure that (1) their needs are heard and understood by IT, and (2) they understand that they can rely on IT to "get it" and deliver the desired solutions.
• Quality Assurance- Just because you didn't develop it doesn't mean you don't have to make sure everything works before going live.  Your QA people understand how to write and execute test cases to ensure a minimum of issues when releasing a new service or feature, which will help in building confidence in moving to the cloud.
• Network Administrator/Engineer- Cloud services require network/Internet connectivity, which is now a mission-critical infrastructure component.  IT may spend more time focusing on network performance, monitoring, and maintenance to ensure access to corporate applications.

As you evaluate these and other roles, consider the strengths of your existing team members and identify those that can start evolving into these roles.  Next, determine all of the change factors (compensation, reporting structure, etc.) as a result of any reorganization.  Then start engaging one-on-one with team members about the possible opportunity to expand and evolve his/her role into the cloud space.  Positioned correctly, the response may well be enthusiastic beyond your expectations.

Building momentum

It's been over a month now since I started my new role as an IT leader.  In that time, I've focused on meeting people, learning about the institution and its expectations of IT, and understanding what we do and how we've gone about doing it.  It's provided me with key insights when considering both immediate next steps and the overall path forward.

Organizations of all sizes and shapes tend to figure out a way of getting things done and stick with that path, largely out of famiilarity.  While this can help to improve the precision of task completion (i.e. the same task is done the same way each time), it also can close the door to different practices and methods.  I've long thought that once a group of smart and curious people start really considering their options, they tend to arrive at a new and interesting way to get things done.  Getting started with those first rounds of consideration, then, are key.

Like anything else, the leader's role is to motivate others and create the right situation for the team to succeed.  This is not an overnight activity - it takes significant time and effort (proportional to the size of the organization) to both communicate a vision and get everyone actively excited about the possibilities of participating in that vision.  Moreover, the leader must be consistent in the message and continually find concrete examples that support the vision.

The primary positive effect of this is momentum - the team gets excited about the opportunities to grow and renews its commitment to its mission.  You may also find, as I have, that you get excited as well - having these conversations and getting positive responses is motivation to keep working toward creating the situation for continuous improvement and high performance.  A motivated group is probably the most important part of what comes next.