I recently attended an IT dinner that included CIOs and other IT executives from several industries, including higher education, automotive, banking, and small-scale manufacturing. As often happens at these events, conversation drifted to the cloud. Cloud is a huge concept, of course, and it means different things to different people. What surprised me was the amount of trepidation I was hearing about the cloud. I heard it expressed in a couple of ways:
- We know someone who moved their data center infrastructure to the cloud and then the company went bankrupt, which left them five days to pull down their data.
- We are very conservative and would prefer to keep our data in-house.
- We don’t need the cloud because space is not at a premium for us, so there is no cost-effectiveness in moving our data to the cloud.
I was relieved when someone from the other end of the control-enablement spectrum spoke up at the end of the dinner to say that they allow their graduate students and faculty to request cloud services and application access themselves, as if they were using Amazon.com without a credit card.
As I reflected on the idea it struck me that this is actually the sort of IT model we should be following, moving from an IT request and control-centric world to a user-enabled IT world. Think about why IT keeps data and infrastructure close to the vest. They want it in-house because they feel they can do it better. They feel the data is more secure in-house, and that this security trumps the higher cost.
But what about the business benefits of instantaneous IT service delivery that IT no longer has to manage, once the governance and security SLAs are in place? Wouldn’t it make more sense to manage a vendor relationship and services versus managing your own infrastructure, servers, software, and infrastructure staff?
When I think of enablement, it’s about how we actually deliver the capacity and applications in the way our users want, as opposed to an inward-facing view that comes with a running monologue of, “This is how I’ve done it and I’m doing it well, and I have control over it, I know what people are doing, and I know what my security policies are.”
In my view, what you lose in this transition from control to enablement is a lot of headaches and a lot of manual labor. (As a former network administrator who used to switch out tape drives once a week I am quite familiar with the latter.) Yet what you gain is so much more – the ability to deliver services you’ve never delivered before, services your users are actually asking for right now.
Jen Skrabak, PMP, PfMP, MBA, is a senior level project executive, leading high profile business and technology transformation projects, programs, and portfolios. She currently serves as the leader for the Program Management Office at a Fortune 15 company, and has over 18 years of professional experience across broad industries such as healthcare, biotechnology, entertainment, and financial services.
