Cloud adoption is changing the way companies address their business requirements, which in turn is reshaping the role of IT. The flexibility, agility, and cost efficiency of cloud-based solutions are making more sense to businesses that desire the ability to quickly respond to shifting business priorities and market conditions.
Today, IT leaders are tasked with supporting growth, increasing revenue, advancing innovation, and delivering new customer experiences. According to industry experts, cloud computing changes the function of IT from “install and maintain” to “broker and communicate”.
One concern cloud technology brings with it is rogue IT- if a company’s IT department is not capable of moving fast enough, any department can go online, find a software-as-a-service application and provision that application themselves relatively easily. Then IT is left to figure out how to manage all of these new demands and devices, and monitor and maintain the user-provided infrastructure.
CIO online recently posted an article about the state of enterprise tech, which has moved from company-centric to user-centric. The article features Ralph Loura, vice president and CIO at The Clorox Company. Loura was among a crowd of IT decision makers during a panel discussion featuring chief executives from hot enterprise tech vendors.
Today’s CIOs take their marching orders from line-of-business managers while dealing with rogue enterprise apps and cloud services on a massive scale. In fact, 40 percent of all IT spending is now outside of the traditional IT budget, according to a recent report from CEB.
When a business user rushes up to Clorox’s Loura asking him to support a cool new app, Loura doesn’t sign off right away. If he did, he might end up with a couple dozen, say, collaboration apps. Instead, he’ll gather multiple requests and then find a solution that works for both the front-end users as well as back-end IT, such as continuity and security.
“Islands of collaboration do no good,” which is the result of being user-led, Loura says. “User-centric is about looking at and understanding the need, not the ask.”
For you visual folks, Vittorio Della Rossa, an IT Executive Consultant, posted a recent article for the IBM “Thoughts on Cloud” blog speaking to his thoughts on the changes seen in IT organizations over the years. He diagrams out changes seen in the organizational structure from the 70s and 80s to today. Innovations in cloud computing are clearly starting to change the structure of IT departments, and in his post he’s considered just a few possibilities for what those changes might look like. If you’d like to read the entire post or take a stab at your own diagram, comment here.
The bottom line is that successful companies embrace the ever-changing technology world around them. IT should be an integral part of every business and should be positioned as an advisor/consultant, available to assist with all technology decisions from continuity to security.
