The transition to cloud solutions is inevitable. We're hitting an inflection point where businesses are moving from traditional IT environments to cloud-based environments. And while cloud may not yet be mainstream for your organization, it won't be long before you need some expertise and experience to help you manage this dramatic change.
From a staffing standpoint, start thinking about how you're going to evolve your skills and capabilities over time from operating the network, operating the systems, managing the storage, and other tools of production tasks to understanding the business, bringing solutions to the business, and thinking on an enterprise scale and beyond. You're still going to need to do some production work, but you may increasingly shift repetitive and well-understood tasks to vendor partners.
At the same time, you need to incent, encourage and train your folks. Support them as they start to make the journey from focusing on low-level operational details to thinking about how they're going to help solve business problems. We're not talking about running the operating system anymore. We're talking about thinking about the enterprise and figuring out how to solve enterprise business problems using technology. And that's a different set of skills for IT people.
You still need to understand the details of how IT works, but now you need business knowledge as well. You need financial skills. You need communication skills. You need selling skills, and a variety of other skills. And that's new for a lot of IT people. It doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't need to happen overnight. Over time, though, IT organizations should be moving their teams in that direction.
Read Lee's article, "Three simple ways to make the cloud work for you."
Lee Congdon is CIO of Red Hat. His role includes enabling Red Hat’s business through services, such as knowledge management, technology innovation, technology-enabled collaboration, and process improvement.
