Taking the leap

It's been too long.

The primary reason for the long gap in posting is the focus of this post. Back in May 2011, I posted on the cloud operations model, building on excellent discussions among the Clouderati. At the time, I provided a few possible outcomes of moving to this model, including:

• Data center management moves to a centralized team, who can focus on building the expertise and committing the time and energy to being great at it.
• IT people tasked with delivering applications and services can now do so without spending undue time on underlying infrastructure.
• Time reclaimed from reducing data center redundancies and time to deploy services can be redeployed to high-value IT activities that more directly enable business growth, such as researching emerging technologies and business process analysis.

At the time, I was just starting to think about how these might work in my workplace. As a large, distributed enterprise, the cloud operations model seems to make a lot of sense. At the same time, it's not a familiar framework and would require a lot of work and some success to get going. So for the past several months, off we went:

1. Build an initial community: More or less by definition, a cloud-based model requires multiple parties to participate. That meant someone to actually run the cloud and tenants to use it. Thankfully, others had similar thoughts and from there, an internal group started discussing what we wanted to achieve and how we go about showing others this whole cloud thing was for real.
2. Get a cloud, any cloud: For reasons previously discussed here, going directly to the public cloud is not an option. However, we already had the components of a small private cloud, using a minimum of available hardware and software. This allowed our small team to both try out the technology aspects and start identifying the "ground rules" for a more scalable version. During this proof of concept, we also found our community strengthened through shared goals and effort. More to come on this in a future post.
3. Reorient the IT team: Having the cloud is an enabler, not the end-goal. Achieving the second and third bullet points requires change to the organization and reorientation of mission, values, and roles. The last four months have seen a lot of time spent on the question: How can IT deliver high-impact outcomes to the mission of our organization? Historically, we'd spent most of our energy on ensuring basic productivity, which was (and continues to be) core to our mission. But now we can use our move to cloud to start refocusing our time on identifying, articulating, and analyzing organizational needs, and then connecting those needs with existing or new services in our environment or in the marketplace.

So what's next? We just started on items 2 and 3, and though there's a lot of enthusiasm, we need to convert that to staying power. The IT team needs to train on new skills, from systems/applications administration in a cloud setting to business analysis and consulting. We need to spend time with our customers to show them the benefits of the new model and create some successes. Our systems management needs to be simplified to match our needs. These are all reasonable to achieve, and well worth the effort on our way to establishing IT as an enabler for our organization.