Marketing becomes new revenue arm

Traditionally, CMOs have dealt with the “soft skills” of marketing. They headed up cost centers filled with branding, advertising and campaigns that were expensive endeavors, producing benefits that were often difficult to measure. In this current shift, CMOs might not bring CIOs to their knees, but if corporate budgets could talk they would certainly favor the CMO. To wit: Gartner predicts that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. Why? Mobile, big data and real-time analytics are transforming the modern CMO’s organization from a cost center to a critical revenue-driving arm to reach and engage the customer base.

Realizing that CIOs and CMOs probably hate stories of a battle raging between them, there is actually a peaceful, and logical, middle ground in which the two work together to harness the vastness of big data to create real-time – and importantly, actionable – analytics. While the CMO brings the marketing skills to the table, the CIO has the technical chops to deal with capturing, processing and integrating data to make it useful.

Mobile transition requires new tools

The CMO is in a particularly prime position in the increasingly important mobile channel, as the feedback loop is uniquely personal and immediate. The ability to measure, predict and act upon an end-user action has never been more precise.

However, mobile is a different beast and legacy systems designed for the web rely on cookies to track user interaction. As we go more mobile, we enter a world devoid of cookies. New tools are required to match mobile users to their actions across multiple channels. Along with new tools, there needs to be a new partnership – the CMO and CIO united as a Dynamic Duo – working diligently together to deliver the cloud-based and back-office infrastructure required to pull actionable information from big data across all channels: bricks and mortar, web and mobile.

New focus on data-driven outreach

To get a view into what makes the CMO so potentially powerful, let’s turn to another battle, the one that happens on a quarterly basis across corporate America and beyond: The fight to make the quarterly earnings number. Typically, a CEO faced with a sales or earnings shortfall will turn to the CFO and the head of sales and say: “What can you do?”

The honest answer is: short term, not much. They can jam the channel, which will make the next quarter’s number even harder to achieve. Or shovel product out the door at prices that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. But by the time the word gets to the field and actions kick into gear, there can be quite a lag in results. And, again, these results may have value only for the short-term.

In the very near future – one that has already arrived for some organizations – the CEO turns to the CMO, who looks up from his or her laptop and says: “No problem. We should make that number by noon.”

The CFO and head of sales turn and say in unison: “How?”

“While you were talking I found an overstock of our Zing42 and sent an offer to 234,000 customers who have purchased this in the past, and statistically are ready to buy again, and to another 341,000 customers who haven’t purchased this yet, but show a high probability of doing so at the price point we are offering.”

No hurried sales calls to the field asking them to stuff the channel. No broadcasting of sales and discounts that can tarnish an image or weaken a brand. But rather, an analytically-driven offer to a curated digital audience delivered via a simple mobile notification, or in-application offer, to thousands of people who are analyzed and selected to be eager buyers.

This is the look of the CMO ascending: Powered by a cloud of mobile, big data and real-time analytics.

Rob Lilleness is the CEO of Medio, a Seattle-based provider of analytics solutions for mobile computing. Follow him on Twitter @Robmedio.

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The thought to write about what “best” means in technology came to me after reading Joe Weinman’s book “Cloudonomics”. In the book he points out several times that having the best technology doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up with the best solution or service. So how do you determine what’s best?

Some definitions of “best” in IT include:

• Most comprehensive solution
• Lowest priced solution
• Easiest solution to install and get up and running
• Best performing in high latency situations
• Doesn’t require capital
• Doesn’t lock me in
• Highest price

I’m guessing that after having read the seven bullets above, you’re already starting to get a sense of how we sometimes make assumptions about the appropriateness of an IT solution based on incomplete considerations. It seems self-evident what best should mean, but it’s often true that we don’t recognize how priorities can contradict or shift our definitions.

Buying the best

When you buy the best solution in any product category you assume that you are in fact getting the most appropriate solution for the money. That value might be any combination of things from a name (such as Hermes,) to performance or sex appeal (like Ferrari,) or maybe time per transaction (I won’t wait in line at Whole Foods markets).

The reality is that best could mean all of those things or none of them. While it’s almost certain that a bag you buy from Hermes is going to be well made, is it 30 times better than another brand? Is a $1,000 bottle of wine 20 times better than a $50 bottle? If money is no object to you, then the answer is more likely to be yes, a $1,000 bottle is better. On the other hand, if you value the ability to have different bags for different events, or simply prefer the ability to buy a new bag more often, then the $150 bag is probably “best” compared to the Hermes bag.

Buying IT is no different, except that it’s immensely more complex. In IT there are myriad variables that affect the ability to get the most from any solution. These variables include price, features, latency, maintenance, flexibility, open vs. proprietary, required training, user interface, APIs, and more. What about your team’s ability to sell the solution as the right choice to your customers? How about whether or not you’ve got the correct organizational and financial structure to support the solution appropriately?

How to determine what’s best

The decision process for every new technology or solution selection needs to cover a wide list of criteria. These criteria will mostly all be the same for each business but the priorities will change depending on your organization.

The majority of the standard selection assumptions (need, ROI, cost, etc) are well understood, but even among those “standards” there is room for better decision making and prioritization. I like to include the following non-standard criteria when my team is making a solution selection.

• How much value do we get out of the solution at 80 percent of total feature set?
• What other capabilities does this solution open the door to in the future?
• How many of my customers need to use the solution and to what extent before it adds new value?
• What organizational support (business and IT) do I have for the long term “ownership” needs (staff, training, champions, budget, lifecycle, etc.)?
• How does this solution position my team to execute against larger IT and business visions?
• Does this solution leverage other partners and technologies already in use?
• What’s the time to install vs. cost to purchase or time to benefit? (In other words, will I get 30 percent net new benefit value in year one vs. nothing in year one and two, but 80 percent in year three from another solution?)
• Ownership risk assumptions (what assumptions are you making at the front end of any solution selection and are those assumptions still accurate? With modern cloud/SaaS etc., you might not have the ownership risk you “enjoyed” with many legacy platforms)

While I could easily argue that all of the above bullet points are important to every organization, they must each be measured against the organization’s situation at the time. Are you low on cash, but growing fast, do you have a higher risk profile or regulatory concern? The process of prioritization can only be done by the business making the purchase.

Seems like an oxymoron

Sometimes the best purchase is the purchase you avoid, other times the best purchase is the one you didn’t make. IT is littered with examples of purchases that would have been better left undone. However, just as common are those purchases that were never made because they weren’t “perfect”. When you’re looking for perfect, keep in mind that there’s no such thing in software and many cases in hardware, but if you can solve a problem even at 70 or 80 percent, the purchase might still be better than waiting for the “perfect” option.

The test and fail option is much more real today than it ever has been and it’s a good thing. Now you can test, fail, and retry three or four times all for less effort and cost than making one selection in the past. So, step forward boldly, but don’t forget that when you are thinking “best” make sure you’ve really developed a case for what best means to your organization.

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Yet ironically, in an era when technology rules, IT departments are losing ground fast:  The forces of cloud computing, social media, and information management are evolving rapidly, and business managers are discovering and adopting new technology before IT departments even have a chance to master it. Gartner Research predicts that by 2015, 35 percent of most companies’ technology-related expenditures will be managed outside the IT department’s budget.

In order to thrive and have an impact in today’s businesses, IT departments must stay relevant. They must become service-oriented organizations. That means deploying user-centric and agile solutions that meet the business needs of the organization and individual departments. That means delivering IT as a Service (ITaaS), and becoming a team of service-oriented experts.

SaaS: An often too-quick fix

The increased availability of Software as a Service applications (SaaS) makes it easy for individual departments to “go rogue” within an organization. Employees sign up for inexpensive outside-the-firewall public-cloud SaaS apps because they are convenient, easy-to-use, and address immediate needs – and because they believe they can meet their business needs better and faster than their IT department.

But users inevitably run into problems and end up going to IT for help. They may need to integrate the public-cloud application with another internal service, and/or import or export data. Then IT staff find themselves in an awkward position. They have to quickly master the application, understand the problem, and solve it. Along the way, they will likely identify risks associated with the use of this product – including critical security issues. Had they been involved right from the start, they could have provided real strategic value instead of simply putting out fires.

The lure of the public cloud

Likewise, developers are under the gun to conceive, prototype, and test applications, and then to get them into production. They often turn to public cloud providers for initial prototyping, testing, and even final deployment. The cloud offers a easy, self-service platform that developers can control and works the same across the development, testing, staging and live deployment phases. This practice relegates the IT department to the sidelines, and can minimize its value to that of maintaining legacy systems and infrastructure.

Breaking the vicious cycle

IT departments that remain passive legacy-system babysitters will be caught in a vicious cycle. Today, it is the CIO’s responsibility to bring awareness in the organization about the hidden dangers of decentralizing IT. There are four major ways to elevate IT’s role within the business, transforming it from being an old-school roadblock to a visionary service-oriented enabler:

• Be proactive to build internal relationships. The IT department is uniquely fundamental across all areas of an organization, and must capitalize on that. IT staff must show others how well it understands the business, helps users visualize what is possible, and how IT will enable them to achieve their goals.
• Evangelize how central IT safely, responsibly and responsively serves the organization. If business departments are implementing a SaaS app to solve a problem or if developers are deploying code to a public cloud during prototyping and testing, the IT department should, for instance, demonstrate how the cloud can be unpredictable in accessibility and performance, and be rife with security issues. Make the case that IT always puts the business first, safely and securely.
• Become SaaS experts. Even if a department is convinced that a public-cloud SaaS app can solve a specific need, it is critical for IT to be involved from the beginning. The requesting department can judge which apps can best solve their problem and provide the most value, but IT can consider the security, governance, and interoperability angles.
• Provide a self-service platform for the company’s developers. A good enterprise-ready Platform as a Service (PaaS) will convert a static infrastructure into a dynamic powerhouse. An enterprise-ready PaaS will support any application written in any language and framework on any infrastructure that IT has access to. From development through production, the developers can control a self-service platform, which is safe and secure.

The new IT: Win-Win-Win

This new service-oriented central IT model can deliver new  benefits, including lower costs (by eliminating duplicate projects among different departments), more interoperability between differing SaaS applications, improved cohesion among departments, and reduced security risks.

Faster time to market for internal applications dramatically impacts the development side in an organization. An enterprise PaaS provides a common platform environment throughout the cycle and eliminates inconsistencies between development and final deployment. With PaaS, developers can now use the “right tool for the right job,” because any language and framework can be deployed in production.

Bart Copeland is CEO of ActiveState. You can read his blog posts here; follow him on Twitter @Bart_Copeland.

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Seoul, South Korea

Sept. 27, 2012: Last year Schmidt took a trip to much less controversial South Korea, where he met with Samsung execs, promoted Nexus 7 and showed a sillier side by dancing along with Psy and his viral “Gangnam Style.”

Pyongyang, North Korea

A March cyber attack on South Korean computer networks has been traced to an IP address in China, despite many experts suspecting the attacks to originate in North Korea.  (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Jan. 7, 2013: Google’s executive chairman took what many saw as a strange and controversial trip to North Korea, where he advocated for a free and open internet in what he calls “the last really closed country in the world.”

Beijing, China

During a April 2006 trip to Beijing, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt spells Chinese characters “Gu Ge”  at the inauguration of the company new Chinese brand name. (Photo by Guang Niu/Getty Images)

Feb. 20, 2013: Attending a TED-like event known as Geek Park, Schmidt made his first public appearance in China in three years. In his hour-long talk, he discussed Google’s Android operating system and encouraged developers to write apps for it.

New Delhi, India

New Delhi (Thinkstock)

March 21, 2013: While on a trip to the Big Tent Activate Summit in New Delhi, Schmidt warned about heavyhanded control over the internet in China, where he had visited the month before, and advocated for better IT infrastructure in India.

Yangon, Myanmar

Old colonial palace in Yangon, Myanmar. (Thinkstock)

March 22, 2013: Schmidt became the first top  U.S. executive to visit Myanmar after its decades-long military dictatorship. There he promoted a free and open internet in a country ripe for IT expansion.

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Nuance aims to automate what is an increasing headache for IT managers: resetting passwords on corporate computers or software. Anyone who has every worked for a big company is familiar with the situation – too many failed login attempts or letting a password expire suddenly locks you out of your laptop or email. The next step is a call to the IT help desk to get your account privileges reinstated and a temporary password issued.

Nuance proposes to automate that identification process with a new service called FastReset, which allows an employee to authenticate their voice against a biometric print on file. The software can either be embedded directly into a Windows PC and accessed through the computer’s login screen or implemented externally, requiring an employee to call an automated system.

While Nuance is most famous for providing the core natural language understanding technology behind Apple’s Siri, it’s been branching out into security as of late. Instead of trying to interpret words and meaning from the tremendous variety of human speech, it’s using the unique characteristics of each individual’s speech as a kind of vocal fingerprint. Nuance is already supporting similar technology in the consumer mobile market, using voice ID as a means of unlocking handsets.

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There is ample evidence commoditization is occurring, and we could point to almost any area of IT to see it, from servers, PCs, virtualization, storage, networking, and so on. However, what is often lost in the obvious is that it’s not that simple.

IT commoditization vs cars

It’s true that with a modern server and chip combination you could likely solve almost any specific workload demand of a modern application. The inherent risk though is that there’s always someone out there looking to make a better rat trap, and the market continues to show that there is real demand for differentiation – consider the viability of both ARM and Intel chips for use with different job types.

For instance, in the case of Intel you could easily brute force the same workload that an ARM chip could handle, but processor by processor you would likely be very inefficient from a utilization and power consumption perspective. The same is true for ARM chips being used where a larger Intel processor might be more effective. While the aforementioned example is a simple one, it applies across most layers of infrastructure: storage, network, I/O, virtualization, and so on.

To make an analogy: Cars have been around for over 100 years now, they must be commodity by now, right? They all (mostly) have four wheels, two or more doors, a combustion engine (mostly) and generally get you from point A to point B successfully.  Are cars a commodity compared to each hand-built car of the late 1800s and early 1900s? Maybe. But only in the sense that we can each buy a Ford Focus with the exact same feature set as another Ford Focus.

You can also buy a Ferrari, which is excellent for country highways and tight corners, or you can pick a Dodge minivan, which is better at hauling the soccer kids around. Each of these two cars have substantially different features and solve different problems, yet they are both cars. So, the simple answer is no, they are not commodity if by commodity you mean there is little or no profit or differentiation to be found.

Drivers that make unique IT solutions critical

CPU Performance – There are some tasks that will need the fastest possible processors. The benefit comes from the time reduction associated with running a workload. The time is so valuable that the cost of the infrastructure and power is immaterial. In many cases this type of environment is refreshed 18-month cycles, but sometimes as few as every six months.

Network Bandwidth – Critical if the data being manipulated or distributed is being moved outside the confines of where the compute resides, or needs to be moved fairly quickly in very large amounts.

Network Performance – In terms of not just bandwidth but also latency. In some cases customer demands are on the level of differences of nanoseconds.

Storage Scale vs. I/O – Similar to networking, the type of storage you need is dependent on the type of work being done. You don’t solve an I/O requirement by just buying bigger arrays with more and larger SATA disks. You also don’t put large cache or expensive memory on storage that is mainly used for archival or lower performance requirements, such as for photos.

These only scratch the surface of the variables associated with building an infrastructure environment, but clearly it would be difficult to create a small handful of solutions or solution providers to take care of every IT workload demand. To the contrary, in my work I regularly see a significant number of players enter the market that either fill an unmet need from an industry perspective or enable new types of performance and pricing models.

Why commodity IT is a bad idea

Not only do I think we’re many years away from having a small handful of service providers deliver us compute on demand, I propose that more importantly, we should all hope that the day never comes anyway. I am against the idea of a utility form of compute delivered to everyone much the same way for many reasons, but the two that I think are the most critical are monopolies and innovation.

Cloud monopolies would be bad

The arguments against service providers acting under the pretext of a public utility are legion: inefficiency, waste, corruption, etc.  (For more detail, refer to the eye-opening book “The Fine Print” by David Cay Johnston.) Considering the importance of compute to the global economy, the last thing we should ever want then is for it to become a monopoly. If we allow a few companies to push the technology to a true commodity business model, then we could count on real competition for service delivery to disappear, as there wouldn’t be an easy way for the little guy or regional player to participate in the market. And it’s the ability for little guys to introduce innovation that sparks competition and evolution.

If Cloud were to become a monopoly service, we would quickly find ourselves suffering the same issues with many other public utilities:  running on older equipment, getting charged for non-existant services or things we don’t understand, and having no one accountable to address complaints.

Innovation would be stifled

Beyond that, Innovation in any market only occurs through necessity. Without real competition, the commodity cloud services would begin to act like so many of the early infrastructure outsource providers did and only deliver to the lowest common denominator. They would make changes more slowly and as customers we would be forced to plan our businesses around what providers were willing to do. IT will be its most successful when the business customer doesn’t have to consider the “limitations” before advancing strategic opportunities.

While there’s little doubt that several big players would come to dominate the market as is already the case today, we cannot afford to be without all those spunky new companies looking to carve out a market for themselves. These little players will force the larger players to stay honest, to bill correctly, to offer new services, and to continually innovate.

The Good News

I don’t really think we have anything to worry about, because as I’ve already indicated I don’t believe we are at any near-term risk of getting to a utility-type delivery of compute resources market. There are just too many ways to (in this case) build that car. So rest easy: We’re going to continue to see lots of great innovation in the infrastructure and application services and delivery space for some time to come, but keep your eyes and ears open all the same.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where he is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

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That would mean up to 45 million Americans looking for replacement roles in any ten-year span. Yes, my numbers were developed anecdotally from previous experience in combination with information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As an example in 2002 there were roughly 15 million manufacturing roles. When you combine that with operations oriented IT or service oriented roles you can quickly come up to 45 million affected positions.

It gets worse, not better.

The first world has been lucky. We had the last 100 years to help folks through a changing job market in the manufacturing sector, yet we still often failed. Many of the employees during this 100-year stretch felt they could make a good-enough living without a college degree or seeking a path into alternate roles in their company. This “good-enough” mentality is now causing the first world real issues as they try to transition these folks effectively either into early retirement or new jobs.

It’s not just manufacturing. Even computer programming has experienced this cycle of job obsolescence. Consider all the assembler and Cobol programmers whose careers in the 60s and 70s seemed as if they would last forever.

Today’s job market is very obviously different from a century or even three decades ago. Many of today’s positions have a lifespan of less than 10 years. Almost any manufacturing role or traditional IT infrastructure role would fit into this category. This sub-10-year job lifespan already affects millions of positions in the U.S. alone. Interestingly five years from now we’ll look back longingly at the good old days when a job (role) might last 10 years. The accelerating change associated with advancements in technology has increased the speed at which many jobs become obsolete.

Why now is different

Think of the trauma caused in a single-industry town (logging, manufacturing, fishing, etc) when the winds of change (regulations, technology, climate) eliminate that industry in that location. This trauma occurs even though we often see the change coming for a decade and the jobs have been largely the same for 30 or more years already.

Today, that same trauma would be magnified by the fact that most of the jobs would be less than 10 years old and the town will likely have two years or less to react to what the future holds. That assumes, of course, that the town or people in that town are actively paying attention to the future. In order to continue to grow our companies and our economy we must get away from the reactive response to role changes or compensation changes and think more strategically about how we protect our employees.

The role of HR, business and you

If you agree with the risks implied in the above, then there would seem to be no alternative but to rethink how most modern companies recruit, hire, train and retain employees. The employer and employee are going to need to work together to effect this change. HR isn’t always going to understand whether a specific role or function is becoming outdated, so they will have to work with employees and leaders.

The knowledge of “what’s coming” should be translated into your training/retraining programs. Basically you should be training your team to take jobs that don’t exist so they are ready when they do. It also means that reward systems need to be reworked significantly. Current systems tend to emphasize excellence at a particular skill. Instead you should be putting emphasis on how well employees work themselves out of their job. In effect the employee should be creating their own obsolescence.

There are several areas of opportunity in the corporation to help reduce the trauma of this shift:

• When recruiting places new or additional emphasis on skill development capability in the potential recruit
• During hiring, include discussion and planning around the growth of the employee beyond just “I’d like to be a manager someday” or “senior system admin.”
• Training should focus as much on how effectively employees can change as it does on a specific skill set. However, training will also need to include “retraining” of staff as an ongoing part of the employer/employee responsibility.

Governments can also play a role since, it seems logical that they would be interested in helping companies that are working effectively to support employment in the U.S. Some simple suggestions include:

• Labor areas where the traditional rules of benefits are softened, but the rules for training and retraining are increased.
• Tax incentives could be applied in order to push companies and workers to develop better retention and training programs. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that we incent companies or employees to keep doing jobs we can get rid of, just the opposite.

And of course, employees also have a role to play. Instead of whining about how hard it is to find another system admin job or a manufacturing line operator position, take responsibility for developing your career and working with your leadership to be prepared for what’s coming. Keep up your education current through any processes available, from night classes to cross training, industry participation and reading. As employers we need to take more interest in how well our employees are being developed so that they are a greater enabler to our success.

At the end of the day, if we have higher employment our companies sell more, which means more opportunity for all.

Building photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  Vladitto

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

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The nature of application-specific infrastructure (read: hard-wired, inelastic and over-provisioned) meant IT’s other unsaid role was to limit consumption of services. They were too busy maintaining the fragile infrastructure to deliver many other value-added services. Adding capacity or new systems was almost viewed as an expensive distraction.

But the environment is changing — more services are available in a consumerized fashion, creating “shadow IT”; BYOD demands from users are increasing; IaaS, PaaS and SaaS clouds are simplifying outsourcing of certain categories of services; end-users expect simpler, faster access to the resources they demand.
The resulting shift for the CIO and his IT staff will be a logical response to these trends, pressured to leverage increasing amount of public, even consumer-style services. Thus IT and its organization will gradually shift in the following domains:

• Functional roles: Shift from building most services from the ground-up, to sourcing services from IaaS/PaaS/SaaS providers. The partial exception being building private clouds.
• Skill sets: Shift from technologists and functional specialists, to evaluators of services from external vendor sources. More roles will tend to focus on service provider assessment and relations.
• Consumption model: Shift from limiting and regulating service consumption, to encouraging consumption and accelerating new service adoption to become more competitive. This is consistent with the trend of consumerized IT and BYOD.
• Operational function: Shift from custom engineering of internal services, to integrating the supply chain of both internal and external services. When looking at the cost, performance, governance and risk profiles of composite services, IT’s model will need to extend outward to an ever-larger ecosystem of external providers.

In essence, the CIO’s focus will tend to move “up the stack.” To better serve the enterprise, she’ll be relied-upon to manage and integrate services provided to the business.

Integrating providers and the cloud operating model

The cloud operating model – née, paradigm – has it that lower-level infrastructure mechanisms for compute, network and storage will be more automated and highly elastic. That leaves more of IT’s time, money and attention for the actual innovation and operation of the services themselves. Regardless of whether those services are internally or externally generated.

Logic has it that over time, most of IT’s operational attention will therefore turn to:

• Sourcing selection & optimization for each outsourced service. Everything from contract negotiation to vendor performance management.
• Development and innovation of service components for services that remain internally generated.
• Integration and delivery of end-user-ready services to the line-of-business users. Include here the ability to rapidly add a new vendor service to the portfolio, and make it available through one or more portals for end-user consumption.

Next, consider how the shift in operational roles plays-out: As more of IT’s focus turns to sourcing services from outside providers and/or deploying services on internal clouds, core infrastructure engineering functions will tend to decline. Simultaneously, functions that will increase are those which serve to integrate each of the individually-sourced services.

Whether sourced internally or externally, each service still requires integration with:

• Identity and access management for each provider;
• Data compliance, legal and regulatory audit access across each provider;
• Security compliance systems;
• Provisioning, including capacity forecasting;
• Performance (e.g. SLA) monitoring;
• Cost and budget tracking (i.e. for billing, showback and/or chargeback);
• Disaster recovery and redundant service sources where needed.

In the past, many of these functions were hand-integrated across the few external services used, and custom-engineered into each internally created stack. But time is changing the model. With more services provided by outside clouds, the need for a more efficient integration function will escalate. Integration will need to be standardized and replicable, scalable and responsive to the business’ needs.

And therein we see how the CIO/IT’s roles will need to morph. More time, technology and managerial attention will need to focus on standardizing the workflow to (and between) cloud-based services. Even expect to see a resurgence of the concept of the “service bus to assist in this effort.

The end game for the CIO: IT supply chain master

As more sophisticated and essential cloud services are made available from external providers, the role of the CIO will shift from building technology to integrating services. Thus managing and orchestrating the IT supply chain will be the new operational job for his staff. And with that, the IT organization will have to slowly adapt and refocus on service specification, vendor evaluation, service integration, contract/SLA management, and vendor/service management.

The CIO can begin setting the groundwork for this eventuality today. Take a second look at the buy vs. build option. Create streamlined processes to improve integration of external services. Offer commercially available external services within internal service catalogs. And change IT’s mindset from having to be the source of engineering all services, to one of securely brokering services.

These changes will help the CIO develop an IT function that is more responsive to the needs of business, competitive with external alternatives, and encourages consumption of IT services. The traditional trade-off of buy-vs.-build is shifting toward “buy.” But to do so, integrating services will become the critical defining role for the CIO.

Ken Oestreich is a marketing veteran helping develop new categories in the Enterprise IT, Data Center, and cloud computing spaces. He has held product and corporate marketing roles with Sun, Cassatt, Egenera, and EMC. Find him on twitter as @fountnhead.

Puzzle image courtesy of Flickr user Adam_T4.
Desk photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Sergej Khakimullin.

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In my experience as an advocate for cloud transformations at newScale and Cisco, it’s the thinking around the people part of this equation that is the weakest link in the chain. For all the boxes and arrows we draw on whiteboards, comparatively little thought is given to what cloud means for people and roles.

Clouds are designed around the principle of a standardized service. As a cloud builder, you’ll need to embrace the concept of the service as the center of gravity for your IT delivery model, which will dictate some new roles in your organization. For example:

1. Product manager

Cloud services are well-described, standardized menu items that are pre-integrated with all of their required ingredients. When a service is requested, it’s ready to run. This points to the need for a product manager, who acts as the service designer, lead architect and voice of the customer for these cloud services. As a cross-functional role, the product manager must have a broad understanding of system attributes that span compute, network, storage, security, operating systems, middleware and application technology.

Even more importantly, they need to have a deep appreciation for the consumers of the service and know how to walk the line between specific requirements and the need for standardization.

It’s been four years since I first blogged about the importance of product management as a discipline for enterprise IT, but it’s more relevant than ever before in the age of cloud computing.

2. Automation engineer

Cloud builders need to hire automation engineers responsible for automating and integrating infrastructure and software at scale. These are advanced system administrators deeply skilled in data center automation concepts who treat infrastructure as code. Their magic is applying automation to any activity that’s performed more than once, removing the variability and delay of human intervention to enable the quality and speed that cloud depends upon.

3. Cloud orchestrator

Equally important is the cloud orchestrator who is tasked with defining and managing the automation architecture itself and mapping it to IT processes. Roughly, the orchestrator must:

• Interrogate existing IT processes to document how they are currently executed
• Compose processes as a work flow of sequential steps, with detailed pre- and post-conditions
• Encode processes as a set of policies that govern how the automation is carried out

This last part is particularly important for ensuring that a cloud functions efficiently at scale. Here, policies must also include usage rights, consumption thresholds, capacity allocation rules, financial costs and accounting to make things more efficient and prevent resource hoarding. In this sense, your cloud orchestrator is both a technologist and a social scientist who employs both carrot and stick to guide and enforce behaviors through process design.

Defining and automating your IT processes must be carried out with brutal and rigorous specificity, which is a principle I’ve written about and applied extensively through my travels.

4. Release manager

In the same sense that cloud often calls for converged infrastructure, it also dictates something of a convergence and blurring of roles. The service-based concept we’ve discussed shifts work from a focus on independent silos at a specific layer of the stack to collaborating on vertically integrated offerings.

It’s important to re-think how these siloed groups will converge in practice. At Cisco, one approach is cross-training a team: a server admin is certified in network, a middleware specialist is certified in infrastructure, etc. The silos are then brought together as one team. Now, when a problem occurs, it’s handled within a family with a common vocabulary.

It’s also important to assign a release manager as the conductor of these interdependent roles. Part integration engineer, project manager and cat herder, this role is the catalyst and the glue for getting new services and updates into the hands of internal and external customers.

It’s important to recognize cloud for what it is: a new operating model for IT. Clearly, a new operating model dictates a new organizational structure. That’s why cloud builders who pay particular attention to the people part of the equation will emerge as the true winners in the cloud transformation.

Rodrigo Flores is a cloud enterprise architect in the Cisco Intelligent Automation business unit, leading the technology direction and vision for Cisco’s cloud management stack. He came to Cisco via the acquisition of newScale, Inc. where he was founder and chief technology officer.

Image courtesy of Flickr user radiant guy.

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