The cloud changes IT culture, demands new tech skills
The emergence of the cloud is heralding a shift in the skills that IT workers need and the jobs they are doing. It's changing the entire culture inside IT departments.
"The cloud is part of the evolution of IT," said Mike Chapple, senior director for IT service delivery at the University of Notre Dame. "People can't be living in one particular technical silo anymore."
The trend is also altering the balance of who is pushing to migrate to the cloud. IT often is no longer shepherding the cloud migration. Business executives are dragging IT into the cloud and tech leaders are finding themselves being forced to keep up.
Technology leaders told Computerworld about these changes during AWS's recent re:Invent cloud-themed conference.
Those shifts are starting with how IT sees itself fitting inside the business as a whole.
For some time now, IT managers have talked about aligning IT with the business side -- understanding business needs and trying to meet them. Today, though, that idea is taking a step forward.
Since the cloud is enabling IT workers to offload a lot of their work, they're now able to focus on projects they simply had no time for before. And with the cloud, programmers are able to build and test their apps much faster since they don't have to wait for a server to be ready to use.
That means the business is getting their IT-related requests through much faster. It also means IT has more time to focus on the business and not just on keeping email up and tending to data stores.
"We're having some very fundamental conversations," said John Trujillo, assistant vice president of technology at Pacific Life Insurance Co. "I'm a technologist but I am in the business service business. We grew up being the rackers and stackers and the ones who tweaked the servers. The challenge now is to change that mindset from being a service provider to a service broker."
"IT shouldn't talk about aligning with business," added Trujillo. "We have to be as much a part of the business as anyone else. It's no longer about racking and stacking."
At The Weather Company, the parent company behind The Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground, managers don't even use the term "IT department" anymore.
"We're taking a whole new approach," said Landon Williams, vice president of infrastructure architecture and services at The Weather Company. "We call it technology. The culture we wanted to have people in when they're approaching decision-making is not to think like a legacy IT department, but to think like a start-up, next-gen department."
The Weather Company simply doesn't want its technical staff to be locked into an old, traditional way of thinking about solving problems and advancing the business. A name change, it decided, was the best way to start making that happen.
Williams' staff had to get their collective heads around the idea of going all-in with the cloud. It took them about two years to see that all the changes they were going through ultimately was going to make their lives easier.
"It takes a while for everybody to get their heads around the scariness of change," he said. "As with any evolution anywhere, you've got the ingrained idea to go with the way something has always been done. To approach folks who are digging their heels in, we tell them, 'Remember this is about business and revenue and not the technology you've liked.' "
Working with the cloud simply pushes or pulls you into new ways of thinking about how you get your job done.
Bob Micielli, director of enterprise technology services for King County, Wash., was taken by surprise when business executives didn't put up the biggest roadblocks to moving to the cloud.
Those roadblocks, he said, came from his own people.
"The biggest pushback was from my own staff," said Micielli, who saved the county $1 million by moving from tape backup to a cloud-based backup, as well as $300,000 in operating costs year-over-year.
"That, I've found, has been the biggest challenge. People are competent in their certain technologies and now they're coming in and trying to figure out these new services. They, before, felt like experts. 'I'm a storage architect. All I do is storage.' In this world, that doesn't work anymore. You have to know about storage and security and networking."
Stephen Orban, the head of enterprise strategy at AWS and the former CIO and global head of technology at Dow Jones & Co., said when he's talking to enterprises about cloud migration, the single biggest sticking point is not at the executive level but with CIOs trying to get their teams to develop the skills they need to make the transition.
IT workers need to understand how to use the cloud. They need to be able to handle automation and DevOps, combining the role of developer with operations and other IT jobs. They also need to be able to work with big data and mobile.
"We don't' need someone who knows how to preserve bits," said Notre Dame's Chapple. "Our vendor does that. We don't need capacity planning. We've got that. We need people who can take the building blocks -- like virtual servers and elastic block stores -- from the cloud and put them together. You need to put together the storage and the server and the network and DNS and security to create your IT service."
Robert Mahowald, an analyst with IDC, said his firm's enterprise surveys have found that there's generally a 50% skills gap between where IT workers' skills are today and where companies want them to be in two years.
"People who have had traditional roles will either be retrained, repurposed or reskilled," said Mahowald.
At The Weather Company, Williams said, all 400 of its tech staffers are are doing a different type of job today than they were before the company moved to the cloud.
All of them.
"They play in the same place but with an entirely different set of skills," said Williams. "All of them are now retrained or they've added to their skills or they are doing something different."
Most of the changes the tech workers had to go through were at least eventually met with acceptance and sometimes excitement. Fewer than 10 of their IT people left the company because of the changes they were asked to make.
"Most folks, once they get past that, get excited about the change," said Williams. "Some folks get frustrated and move on and that's obviously unfortunate."
Another trend: There has been a switch-up in who actually is pushing for companies to move to the cloud.
In the past, many IT managers wanted to try the cloud with specific apps or services. At the same time, CEOs were hesitant to jump in, largely worried about security, accessibility and reliability issues.
Now, however, many business executives have gotten over those worries but IT workers have developed their own set of concerns about changing their skills and their jobs.
"Now that the cloud isn't so new and scary, IT still wants to poke around but business is saying, 'Now! Stop screwing around and get on the cloud!' " said Mahowald. "IT still wants to piecemeal it. They're not taking the big step to build cloud-first, think cloud-first and build databases in the cloud. They're still thinking about Band-Aids."
He added that much of IT's hesitance is increasingly political. It's not about whether the tech will work or if it will benefit the company. It's about the fear that the cloud is taking their jobs away.
That, according to Mahowald, is frustrating business executives.
At The Weather Company, Williams definitely has seen that switch. Luckily for him, he was already pushing hard toward the cloud so business and tech have been moving in the same direction.
"In our first two years, anytime we had conversations, the enterprise was saying, 'No, no. I get it but I've got records and complex applications and we're always going to run those on our own data centers,' " said Williams. "Then about a year ago, I started seeing the flip, where people weren't telling me I'm crazy anymore. I was like, 'It's about time...' Suddenly they were saying, 'Let's go all in.' "
IT leaders say to help convince tech workers to move toward the cloud with more speed and less resistance, they need to talk openly with them about the new skills they'll be gaining, the broader jobs they'll be able to take on and the projects they'll be able to do that they never had time for before.
"This is the history of IT," said Chapple. "If you're going to be in IT, you need to know you're in a field that's constantly changing. We've always had new tools at our disposal. The cloud is a larger scale change than we've experience in a number of years but it's natural. You keep your skills current."