Redefined skills
As IT departments increase their use of
outsourcing or cloud or managed services, Woyzbun says key skills will include
“incisive business analysis (not just requirements collection) and effective
vendor management.” It will be essential, he says, to create integration
between disparate services, as most SaaS solutions address only part of an organization’s
application requirements. Conversely, application development skills are
becoming less important as package software or SaaS replaces internally
developed applications. Elsewhere, simple technical jobs will decrease as
organizations move to managed services and platform as a service,” he says. “On
both the vendor management and analysis side, smart organizations are
establishing specialized positions or departments to carry out these
responsibilities better. The transition to the cloud is moving slowly enough
that retraining [IT] should not be a major challenge.”
Application
development skills are becoming less important as package software or SaaS
replaces internally developed applications
Stadtmueller says IT must understand how
sales, marketing, operations, finance, and other functions work, in addition to
knowing the company’s market, regulatory climate, and customer needs. “The
unique combination of business knowledge and technical expertise will allow IT
to play a strategic role in initiating technology-enabled business solutions,
rather than react to requests from other departments.” IT in many SMEs already
possesses the business mindset, creativity, and drive to develop
business-enhancing initiatives, she says. “They just don’t have the time to
think it through and execute.”
Developing relationships
Different business units have different
needs, but cloud computing magnifies this fact, meaning IT has a chance to help
decide the direction various units take. As Stadtmueller says, “IT has an
opportunity like never before to establish itself as a strategic organization
fully aligned with business goals.” She recommends IT departments become “cloud
evangelists” that show other departments “how they can benefit from fast
time-to-market, scalability, and low costs with the cloud.”
Woyzbun says good IT departments use the
cloud to extend the IT-related options and capabilities they can pro-pose to
improve performance. Weak departments “fall behind the business in identifying
opportunities and lose control to the business if the business initiates the
opportunity rather than IT.”
IT
has an opportunity like never before to establish itself as a strategic
organization fully aligned with business goals
Operations-wise, Longbottom says IT can
only provide the right options if it fully understands what the business does
now and what it proposes to do in the future. “IT should be in strategic
planning meetings with line of business departments, and the CIO (or
equivalent) should be involved with board-level decisions so that technical
options can be included as early as possible,” he says.
Thibodeaux says the cloud may present only
a slight change for some companies’ IT operations but may be much larger in
others, impacting the department’s behavior and the business processes of the
entire company. “This is the reason for the momentum behind having IT become
more of a partner to the lines of business than a supplier,” he says. “The
ability to use technology through the cloud can streamline the way IT is provided,
but it can also streamline a business. By combining thorough technical
knowledge with operational procedure and strategic objectives, IT can be a
major player in moving a business forward.”
Total elimination?
Is it possible SMEs might adopt cloud services
so greatly in the future they eliminate their IT departments completely?
Similar to consumers in home environments, Stadtmueller says, the smallest of
businesses just might do without IT specialists. Over-all, though, “few
businesses will eliminate IT entirely, nor should they,” she says. Because
technology is more critical than ever to business success, she says, businesses
of all sizes need on-staff experts to understand and drive the value of
technology solutions, including collaboration, social business, big data
analytics, and new solutions forthcoming. SMEs will partner with experts to
manage infrastructure, platforms, and software, she says, but will retain
responsibility for growing its business securely and cost-effectively. “That’s
where IT will always have a role,” she says.
Is
it possible SMEs might adopt cloud services so greatly in the future they
eliminate their IT departments completely?
Woyzbun doesn’t “see individual business
units taking on the delivery of these services, even if all required
applications were available as [SaaS] and the infrastructure services were
obtained externally.” Furthermore, he says, it’s not certain the market will
provide cost-effective, comprehensive, and functionally adequate solutions for
most industry sectors to enable them to fully depend on cloud solutions.
