Despite initial reservations about Cloud Computing and the implications it could have for the future of the IT department, CIOs are now acknowledging that The Cloud empowers their department, rather than undermines it.
A panel of CIOs speaking at the Business Cloud Summit 2010 shared their experiences of the cultural and technological shifts that have been demanded by The Cloud.
And while each revealed that their job has changed significantly with the advent of Cloud Computing, they also praised the new model and hailed the agility that it has provided CIOs.
But the path to this point hasn’t been without its roadblocks.
“I had a conversation with one of our IT directors at the company and he described my Cloud initiative as professional emasculation,” said Charles Newhouse, head of strategy and design, enterprise IT systems at BAE Systems. “He said that there were three things that were important – how many people you’ve got, how much money you’ve got and how much stuff you’ve got. And he told me that I wanted to take away his people and his stuff and with a lot of what he’d spend he would now effectively be buying a service.”
However, Newhouse said that the debate had now moved on.
“Actually what I’m doing is taking away all of that irritation and distraction of having to run that commodity stuff of the business, and now you’re able to focus on the things in the business that actually deliver to the bottom line – not focus on a box full of wires, which is totally unimportant and unexciting.”
Ian McDonald, head of IT at Symbian Foundation, agreed that rather than serving as a death knell for CIOs, The Cloud was in fact freeing them up to become a far more powerful figure within organisations.
“There’s a lot of talk about the CIO becoming the chief innovation officer and getting him talking to the business rather than talking to pieces of metal, and people are starting to realise that The Cloud can actually allow you to do that more because you can deliver things faster, and The Cloud vendors typically innovate at a faster rate than traditional software vendors as well, and when a new feature is announced you don’t have to wait 18 months to three years to deploy that – it can be turned on now,” he said.
SLAs vs KPIs
With Cloud migrations typically having to negotiate some cultural obstacles, the onus has been on CIOs to ensure that they can demonstrate that the service levels and performance warrant the upheaval. Interestingly, despite efforts to drive service level agreements (SLAs) as well as industry standards within the Cloud sector in recent months, the panel were unconvinced about the value of SLAs in the present environment.
“Where we have ripped up some of our other contracts is when the same traditional mistakes that have been made with other vendors. So for us it is more about KPIs than SLAs. There is not a single risk premium that a vendor can take on that would be worth anything to me if my sites were down for half a day,” David Jack, CIO, Thetrainline told attendees. “Therefore it is about spotting where the real trends in performance are and working with the supplier.”
Newhouse was in agreement. “We are increasingly moving to a model where SLAs are obsolete,” he explained. “In my mind there is only one SLA, and that is customer satisfaction. You should have a myriad of dynamic KPIs that you can change in a heartbeat if you think you need to change them in order to understand why your customer satisfaction is degrading. SLAs just get in the way – they are painful, slow moving dinosaurs.”
Ultimately, the panel was in agreement that despite the fact that there had been a fairly steep learning curve with The Cloud, the alternative of ignoring Cloud Computing altogether was potentially a far more complicated path in the long-term.
“For us, it wasn’t ‘what are the economics of Cloud Computing vs traditional computing’ it was ‘how do we speed up the department and how do we cut down on deployment times’ and this just happened to be the solution for us,” says Jack. “We started with the business problems, and then it just fit in.”
“It makes life easier, so why wouldn’t you do it,” added Newhouse. “It also makes life cheaper and more agile. And that is really what drives the public Cloud, because actually running a Cloud is quite complicated – so I like the idea of it being on somebody else’s head!”
