It is a common supposition that one by-product of the Cloud will be the demise of the on-premise IT department. Not only that, but the more the business adopts Cloud delivery of services the more the chance that the IT department will cease to exist.
Some, myself included, have written before that while the IT department will not disappear with the advent of the Cloud , its many roles and function will need to change – some significantly, to match the needs of the new environment.
But now John Easton, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Technology Officer for IBM Systems and Technology Group in the UK & Ireland, has set out to address this issue in a structured, analytical fashion, in a new whitepaper, `The Future of the IT Department - Exploring the impact of Cloud on IT roles and responsibilities’.
Based on first-hand experience working with clients, the paper takes a risky, but laudable, start point: that an enterprise has gone for a full Cloud -based delivery of services and applications, with nothing running on premise. In practice, this will be a rare scenario, particularly for established enterprises with a large IT department. And, as Easton points out in the conclusions, getting there would in practice be a multi-year project.
One of the problems with this subject is that even considered analysis of the issue is prone subjectivity and assumptions. Easton, however, has taken a different route and based his analysis on an established tool, the Component Business Model. This has been developed by IBM to help executive teams model their business in terms of its key components.
This produces a matrix of components with Plan and Manage, Build, and Run on one axis, and Strategic, Tactical and Operational on the other. This maps well onto the roles of IT as it stands today, and whatever it becomes (and is called, for that matter) in the future.
The bottom line Easton arrives at is that the function, at a strategic and tactical level, will still very much have a role to play. This will be true even if an enterprise goes for full Cloud service with no on-premise contribution. Indeed, some functions will become far more important because the service is provided by an external third party source.
And as that service provision is core, the paper points out how some functions will assume much greater significance.
There will, of course, be new skills needed in order to run the IT organisation, particularly in terms of running in much more like a business in its own right. This will require competencies in areas such as business administration are necessary. Many IT organisations lack many of these skills because of the underlying business model, for example where the IT department is just a cost centre.
The paper suggests that many of the activities of the overall business and operational framework for the IT function are no longer required when IT comes from a Cloud provider. Activities that remain, such as sourcing strategy and high-level process frameworks will remain, and arguably become more significant.
In the strategy layer, Business Risk and Compliance Strategy continues to be required, and arguably become more complex. This is because Cloud -delivered services do not allow regulation or legislation requirements to be transferred to them. So new importance is added to the need to assess the ability of the Cloud provider to adequately address both regulatory requirements and compliance with corporate policy.
The development of new services is one area where the Cloud is often cited as a future boon. The IT function will play a pivotal role in this, as the paper points out.
So this is definitely a place where staff capable of making the change can really start to shine. The ability to identify the most appropriate services, to optimise, configure and adapt them to meet the specific needs of the business, and to orchestrate the services together to create a well-tuned business platform, will be the new front line for IT as it moves to become what I would term the Business Transformation Implementation team.
Part of that capability will need to address two fundamental questions with full service Cloud service provision: what is happening to the business, in real time; and what is happening with the provision of services, also in real time. Without second-by-second data on these two questions, any business could soon be in real trouble.
That means the selection and use of both monitoring and analytical tools will become a high priority for IT staff. The paper quotes an Operations Director of a Retail Bank on this point.
One of the core conclusions Easton draws with the paper is that strategic and tactical functions will have greater longevity than operational ones. This implies that IT professionals will need to ensure they have the skills to map on to that new bias, in order to meet these new challenges.
