As more businesses embrace the cloud, IT departments are witnessing big changes. Change is nothing new for IT professionals; however, past change has often been limited to working with technology in-house. Many cloud partnerships take technology out of the physical space, leaving IT employees in more liaison roles. At every level, today’s IT staff must adapt and come out ahead of the cloud changes or risk being left behind.
Different Skills Needed for Different Clouds
Generalized cloud skills that are in demand include Java, SaaS programming, Python, Ruby on Rails, DevOps, shell scripting, Linux, OpenStack, Chef or Puppet. However, each of the three common models of cloud architecture — public cloud hosting, private cloud hosting and hybrid cloud hosting — requires a different subset of skills. IT administrators on private clouds will still need to spend time maintaining and updating the cloud, applying patches, troubleshooting, working with software and applying customer service skills. IT employees whose businesses adopt public clouds will move away from this system response role and work more with APIs and third-party management software to work with off-site clouds. And IT workers in charge of hybrid clouds will need both of these skillsets.
The Changing Role of IT
As these skills demonstrate, IT takes on more of a strategic role and is more likely to be pulling data from the cloud for analysis than completing system maintenance (excepting the private cloud) when businesses move into the cloud. IT can also become more of a service offering, ITaaS, breaking out of the silo role of technology management. When traditional and new IT services complement cloud services, organizations can do more. This brings new challenges for managers and employees, who may now need to market their services, grapple with design issues and predict and respond to interoffice demand for managed IT services.
The Changing Role of Management
Managers’ roles will also change as a result. Managers may take charge of the changing IT role by becoming ambassadors and marketers for the new initiatives and new skills their workers have to offer. CIOs in particular are under pressure to become more flexible and strategic and to add value by increasingly adopting social networking, customer intelligence and mobile technology. CIOs can support these directives by driving innovation through executive and management committees and by acquiring and managing innovative technologies that help employees handle these new directives. For all levels of management, including CIOs, project management skills will be in high demand. Additionally, business skills such as negotiating contracts, creating plans and establishing timelines and budget management will help IT departments succeed in selling their services and liaising with cloud providers.
This doubtlessly spells a change for IT employees and managers both, and change often stirs up uncertainties. Some IT staffers are seeing the glass half empty and mourning the loss of their traditional duties. At present, a mix and match skills opportunity exists where IT staff must learn and apply new skills, yet continue to provide familiar services. One advantage that IT members have is their knowledge of how one piece of software interfaces with another and what environmental dependencies need to be in place to support the software environment. IT staffers can identify and market their environment-specific knowledge for their own success.
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Originally posted on November 19, 2013 @ 10:22 pm