Should you leave cloud deployment in the hands of IT?

A recent Harvard Business Review article “What every CEO needs to know about cloud” was pretty scathing about the role of enterprise IT in the brave new cloud world. “At present, there’s a lot of uncertainty and scepticism around the cloud, particularly among technology professionals who have deep expertise with, or attachment to, on-premise computing. But companies shouldn’t give such people too much influence over plans to move into the cloud: that would be like putting the crew that ran the boiler and steam turbine in charge of electrifying the factory”. Overall the report makes a good read, but these points don’t ring true.

Are IT professionals really luddites?

There is no doubt that the role of enterprise IT is changing and will change further. The business will not give credit to IT for simply   “keeping the lights on” – no matter how difficult that is in practice. The new business currency is “information”.  Analysis and dissemination of information is now a key business need for any enterprise.

Perhaps the Information Week paper by Jonathan Feldman captured the issue better:

“The cloud model is massively transformational... But save us from the current Pollyanna principle, where services are seen as the ultimate answer—everything will not be fine if we can just send IT to the cloud.

Even vendors admit that not every use case is suitable. And enterprise IT, by definition, must serve every use case. Dropping 10%, 20% or 30% of your service catalogue won’t sit well with business leaders.”

So IT professionals are being painted as the barriers to progress – while they realise that “the cloud” is not the nirvana that is being portrayed.  How to address this? Better PR? Not quite.

To quote Feldman’s paper again:  “There are no technology projects, just business projects with technology components”. The goal for the IT function is to explain all their actions in business terms of risk, value and knowledge.
 
Risks, Value, Knowledge

Can anybody really prescribe the right balance between on-premise and off-premise provision for each individual enterprise? Just as with the acceptance that not everything will go to the cloud, the IT function must lead the way in deciding what should stay and what should go. Why? Because they are best placed to present the “buy or build” argument; evaluate the regulatory, delivery and business risk associated with the change for service delivery to the business; and advise on the integration and lock-in issues that may result.

Now to the PR question – does the IT function really sell itself to the business?  Is it perceived as a pro-active member of the team or “Doctor No”? – as I heard at a recent conference. This is not about hyping contributions or delivering a continuous sales pitch – but regularly communicating the value of IT and making sure that IT is seen to be helping the business make sense of this new interconnected, consumerised, digitised world.

And the final question regarding the HBR paper: who would be your trusted-source of knowledge on IT, if not your IT people?  Vendors, Systems Integrators, Consultants?  The pace of change of IT is accelerating. The move to a consumption model rather than source/develop/build/operate will change the emphasis of IT – but having people who really understand the impact of Hadoop, Ruby, Erlang, Mule, HTML5, VXLAN , Openflow and the rest on your business will be crucial going forward.  And who will manage and evaluate the numerous app stores and cloud services your business is going to subscribe to? Colt, I’m sure will be one, but we will not be the only one.

So having IT savvy people, is not the same as having IT professionals.  Most of all, IT is not electricity – and utility analogies are too simplistic – and beginning to be harmful. IT people are not the equivalent of those that managed stream driven engines.  But more of that in another post…