Removing the barriers to application innovation. Slashing cycle times. Rapidly building prototypes for customer-centric experiences. Real-time analytics. At a lot of organizations, these are stated as reasons why business units go around IT to get to the cloud. At GE, they are IT’s goals for the cloud.
Our thought process in offering self-service cloud for our business units is to remove friction. If someone needs to go test an idea, IT should support their speed to market, not go out of its way to block it.
Going to cloud to reduce cost is vital, of course, but we see it as a secondary goal to speed and innovation. This is true whether our business units are simply lifting and shifting applications, making them cloud-aware by leveraging features such as auto-scaling and configuration management, or rewriting an application as a cloud-native, globally low-latency experience.
We also think in terms of opt-in shared services rather than dogmatic centralization, so we can balance our cloud offerings to match the business priorities of multiple P&Ls. After all, we are a conglomerate that runs in multiple industries with differing business cycles.
Accompanying this self-service cloud process is the governance and protection we want to offer every employee working online. Within the confines of this protected environment, we want to allow our business units to run at their own pace. We are pushing some boundaries here as we move forward, but it’s highly effective at the business level because we see some business units absolutely racing forward and others taking a measured approach, which matches their business priorities.
Is stealth IT going away? No, not with the Internet and sales forces pushing services 24 x 7. But it’s not a hopeless battle. As an IT executive, you can still achieve the balance and governance you require at the corporate level, but with enough associated freedom that you help to eliminate the need for shadow IT in the first place.
Lance Weaver is the Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at GE Corporate. His organization is responsible for the architecture, design and implementation of GE’s Industrial Internet and Enterprise IT global strategy leveraging Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds. In his prior role, as CTO of GE Appliances and Lighting, Lance was responsible for the overall technology vision of a $9B division of GE leading a 400 member global team delivering core infrastructure services, application middleware and data analytics. Lance has also held several additional roles for divisions of GE including Executive Director – Application Infrastructure, IT Operations Leader and Chief Information Security Officer. Prior to joining GE, Lance was a consulting engineer for ten years designing, selling and implementing infrastructure solutions for a broad range of customers. Lance holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Truman State University.
