Who are the clever people in cloud?
By Steve Cockerill - Head of Technology Consulting, UK&I
It can't have escaped anyone's attention that the clouds are gathering. Everyday we are seeing new entrants into the cloud industry offering services that will "revolutionise" the way businesses source and provision IT.
Evolution is a wonderful thing. As with life, cloud has morphed over the last ten years from classical "infrastructure as a service" offerings into a broader spectrum of "… as-a-service" offerings that today enable many businesses to operate without a large capital investment in IT solutions.
Organisations such as Salesforce.com have led the charge, popularising the notion that businesses can be agile, flexible and responsive without having to fully own and control their own software and hardware infrastructure. Solutions such as Workday are challenging traditional ERP vendors and are becoming mainstream for key horizontal processes. Furthermore we now see cloud-based services in the middle office, an area that has historically been seen as the heart of a business's ability to differentiate itself against its competition.
But what does this all mean to someone grappling with the challenges of meeting the needs of different stakeholders? Whilst the CFO is focused on cost efficiency the CEO will often be seeking to transform the way their business operates in order to introduce new products and services that drive revenue and profit growth. So how do you, as a CIO, transform your applications and infrastructure landscape to meet everyone's expectation in a world where evolution in consumer IT outpaces the change in enterprise IT by several orders of magnitude and the move to cloud is an overriding expectation from business users that want everything yesterday?
The trick is to think about IT in the same way as your stakeholders. In particular, you should think about the mix of business and IT services required in exactly the same way that the CEO or CFO would, identifying those services that are unique, or differentiating, versus those that are simply "needed" in order to operate effectively. You can then think about the way in which those services are provisioned, either using traditional on-premise solutions or with cloud-based application services.
Unless you have both the luxury and misfortune though of being a brand new startup, it's also likely that your IT estate is in varying states of repair. Most businesses that I meet with find it difficult to tackle the insatiable clamor for "on-demand" services against the backdrop of an ageing IT estate that is hard enough to keep going on a good day.
But you shouldn't think about both types of solution in isolation. Evolution is just a process of incremental and ongoing change cycles. So you should think about the ways in which your IT landscape can evolve, tackling the integration of business processes that are performed in the cloud with those that continue to be services from you existing systems and applications. In that way you can build a sustainable change strategy that can be revisited as your business processes and products evolve.
So if you are facing this dilemma, don't worry as everyone else is too. Anyone can buy services in the cloud, including all those marketing types that don't believe the IT department can keep up; the clever people are those that understand how the cloud gets integrated into the rest of their business so that everyone benefits.
As the sun sets and my to-do list grows longer, it's probably time to bring this post to an end. Over the next few posts I'll continue to muse about the cloud and the opportunities and implications it creates if you're interested. Alternatively, if you have any suggestions about what you'd like to talk about, tweet me @stevecockerill or drop me a note at scockerill@csc.com.