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This is part of the Hybrid Cloud cookbook blog series that touches on the key concepts of building and running true hybrid cloud. By far, the biggest challenge of any Cloud initiative is us, the people. According to a Gartner study, only 6% of failed Private Cloud projects fail as a result of wrong technology, while the rest are because of change management and scope issues. Organizational change is such a wide and challenging topic that there are entire university departments and thousands of books focusing on it. Here, I am focusing on the need to organize your team around outcomes, not around functions. Remember that the core principle of Cloud is to have aggregated services available as a self-service. New Roles as First Step Well-defined, new roles are critical for successful change. If employees do not understand what is expected from them, this will just increase anxiety towards the change and lead to people not performing and doing things according to your wishes. When the new roles have been defined, your first action should be to break up the technology based silos. Examples of new technical roles:
The infrastructure people that are left need to be cross-skilled, naturally with deeper expertise in one or two areas. As an example, EMC Presales has run major-minor –a program where everybody needs to have a curriculum in two areas beyond their main profession. The minor topics have not just been learning new EMC technologies, but taking you to critical areas outside of the core skills, such as learning application skills. New Way to Run Once you have defined new technical roles, the next step and change is a bit more fundamental— start running your IT as business. In a nutshell, it means to divide the IT organization into roles that manage demand and to roles that manage supply. Traditional IT has been organized around roles like Architects, PMs, Admins and around ITIL processes. While you still need those skills, the new “business” organization that looks after demand is organized quite differently. You need product management, sales and marketing, and finance—all the functions that a normal business has. A bit farfetched? No, EMC IT is doing it. The idea is simply to move from a production centric model to a customer centric model. You have a group of IT people looking at user demand, optimizing service portfolios, promoting available services and reporting those back to users. In a business environment, you call these people account managers and product owners.
Here an example of functions in your new IT business management office:
Shadow IT Drives the Change The main driver for the customer centric model is to embrace choice instead of fighting against it. The world where all IT was provided by a single entity (either in house or external) is over. You need to start understanding the needs and requirements and link that to the best solution. Thus, your organization becomes a service integrator. With this, you will not need people who can do a 30 step manual provisioning processes anymore, but rather people who can analyze application workload requirements and assign it to the right cloud with the right policies. Every infrastructure person needs to upskill themselves with applications skills – for example, how an Oracle DB works and what infrastructure needs it has. Final thought – It’s a process Our ask to the people is huge. Not only do they need to be literate in multiple technology areas, but they also need to master the influencing and communication skills and adapt to the continuous change. To achieve that, Gartner claims in their bimodal-IT approach that you need to separate legacy and new and run them separately. My experience is that having a small team innovating and driving new is not going to make the summer. You eventually need most of the people onboard. A trimodal approach tries to break this new vs. old dilemma. Regardless of the model you take, it will be a process. Unlike with artificial intelligence, humans are not as good at adapting to other people’s learnings, which leads to individuals needing to go through the learning curve. But, trying to address all of the people at the same time and way will lead to mediocrity. Knowing this, I suggest trying to get your first 30% to lead the way. As an example, we are running a “Vanguard” program to achieve that. The members of the program do not belong to any elite group, but are tasked with being change agents for driving the change among their peers. Hybrid Cloud Cookbook: New Role and Skill Requirements |
