Is cloud computing having an impact on IT leaders?

I believe it is.

Technology leaders have traditionally been tasked to manage infrastructure, rollout upgrades, integrate disparate systems, and oversee development projects. As they seek economies of scale, better governance, common technology standards, and cost efficiencies, business unit based IT functions have been moving to a centralized “shared service” model. Their focus has shifted away from having deep business unit knowledge to more technology specialization. Often over 80% of the technology budget is now being used to “keep the lights on”. Some argue that this trend has further widened the gap between the business and internal technology experts. Business users may getting frustrated by the “one size fits all” set of shared IT services. This trend coupled with a significant backlog of business requested projects is driving the business to cloud computing solutions.

With the increasing adoption of cloud computing, IT leaders risk seeing the business units take even more of the information processing back from the IT shared service function. Cloud computing helps to remove the challenge of building scalable technological infrastructure, it also minimizes the need for expensive software development environments and developers to create software solutions. With the increasing levels of abstraction that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides, and further abstraction offered by Platform as a Service (PaaS) for configuration and customization, the business together with Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors can create robust elastic (easy to scale) enterprise class solutions with minimal IT involvement.

The importance of infrastructure, and even software development skills is being reduced. High-level abstract thinking skills are becoming more important, such as project management, quality assurance testing, business analysis, system analysis, and business architecture.

Modern computing platforms like Salesforce.com with their multi tenant cloud, scalable metadata platform and enterprise level trust is enabling faster innovation, rapid tailoring while offering secure performance at scale.

So is there a place for IT expertise in this new cloud world?

Absolutely. The skills of data governance, change control, support, design and solution architecture are still essential to create sustainable robust long term solutions. Business users often have to reach out to to their own IT technology experts or external system integrators to get the systems thinking skills needed to build, support and extend their cloud solutions.

Is IT embracing the cloud?

Yes. It started with virtual machines, then platforms and now SaaS