From the Enterprise perspective, now has never been a better time to invest in cloud services. Enterprises are broadly adopting all types of cloud services at multiple levels in the organization. Initial predictions were for the enterprise to favor private and community clouds over public services, but the hottest trends in Cloud adoption has been Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based business applications which are projected to grow from $13.4 billion in 2011 to $32.2 billion in 2016, a 19.1% five-year CAGR! The rapid adoption of SaaS applications of all flavors by the enterprise has been a surprise to many, but the vastly reduced costs due to the pay as you go pricing models, and high degree of service delivery flexibility has overcome any perceptions of needing to trade price for reduced feature sets. Unsurprisingly, the most often added cloud-based application services are Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM), with Web Conferencing, teaming platforms and social software suites nipping at their heels.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) continues to appeal to companies that want to replace in-house and traditional data center models for the cloud hardware abstraction approach. Gartner is predicting Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), cloud management & security devices, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are growing from $7.6B in 2011 to $35.5B in 2016, a CAGR of 36%. A word of warning for companies that think just because the Amazon cloud is easy to use, it is easy to build and manage. Building a private cloud still requires a degree of expertise that few enterprises have in-house. In the next year or so expect more companies to see the value of using the services of cloud consultants to avoid painful and expensive mistakes when building private clouds; or alternatively using emerging enterprise focused public cloud services such as Bluelock or Terremark.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) which still does not quite know what it wants to be when it grows up, is lagging with only about $1B in revenue in 2012, but as the market matures, expect to see rapid uptake as companies recognize the value of standardized tools that can ease the pain of Cloud application deployments. Some of the newer PaaS tools like the ServiceMesh Agility Platform combine the features of a SDLC workflow engine, production support and orchestration across different cloud platforms.

New Cloud Technology Directions

Ultimately, innovation is the marriage of technology and organization change. The dilemma is how to pull innovation into IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern enterprise understanding of IT is focused on operational excellence and cost control. The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new flat organization by leveraging cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways. The trick is to create tools for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework. Cloud tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?

This is not the first time wrenching technology innovation has changed how companies do business, and it certainly will not be the last. Companies able to use disruptive technologies, such as cloud computing, effectively will leave companies who do not have that ability in the dust. By recognizing the seeds of change and embracing them, the smart company can leverage cloud services by using the efficiencies of pooled IT resources at the same time allowing greater flexibility to meet the challenges of the global economy. This combination of combining commodity utilities with innovation allows companies to compete effectively using the efficiency and flexibility strategies simultaneously.

Challenges, Always Challenges…

Consumers intuitively get cloud and have been more than willing to embrace it warts and all as it has matured. They are highly price sensitive and will easily sacrifice features in exchange for low cost. On the other side of the market spectrum, the more conservative enterprise market is still struggling with the basic model. Some companies worry that the emerging cloud companies are too small to do business with, while others are concerned with how to incorporate new technologies into existing technology portfolio investments. To address their concerns, at the same time as Cloud technology continues to mature and standards develop , innovation around service delivery and breakthroughs in storage technologies are making it ever more enterprise ready. The pace of cloud vendor consolidation has already picked up as the traditional enterprise vendors such as HP and IBM has rushed to add enterprise ready cloud services to their portfolios. This should alleviate the fears of even the most technology adverse companies.

A final word for any remaining cloud technology skeptics, as with any innovative force, the cloud is just a tool to drive change, not an embodiment of change itself. Enterprise cloud consulting leaders, have firsthand experience with how companies willing to ride the Cloud revolution will not only survive in today’s hyper-competitive world, but thrive. I cannot wait to see where the next wave takes us!

About the Author
Beth Cohen, Beth Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, Inc., focused on delivering solutions to help enterprises leverage the efficiencies of cloud architectures and technologies. Previously, Ms. Cohen was the director of engineering IT for BBN Corporation, where she was involved with the initial development of the Internet, working on some of the hottest networking and web technology protocols in their infancy.

Enterprise SaaS takes off – With $14.5 billion in SaaS sales (an increase of 17.9% from 2011), lots of providers are getting it right. The biggest news is the boom in enterprise SaaS application adoption. Originally touted as the great leveler, allowing small businesses to take advantage of sophisticated systems hereto only affordable by big companies, the enterprise is rapidly dumping their high maintenance in-house systems and deploying a variety of SaaS services instead. Salesforce of course has long been a big player in this space, but the Workday’s spectacular IPO in October indicates a bright future. Look for lots of interest in Microsoft cloud products such as Office 365 and Azure as companies realize that these are cheaper and more flexible alternatives to traditional desktop tools. The rapid adoption of mobile devices in the workplace and its demand for more business customized apps is only going to accelerate this trend.

OpenStack grows up – While it remains to be seen if OpenStack wins the cloud infrastructure wars against VMware, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, given the number of cloud service providers lining up behind HP and Rackspace to roll out Openstack commercial services, it is not difficult to predict that 2013 will be another banner year for OpenStack. Practically the every major tech company in the world with the notable exception of Amazon is throwing their support behind OpenStack. On the technology side, more tools and functionality than ever makes the future of the largest cloud Open Source project ever definitely rosy.

Cloud Hardware Architectures get real – Over the last year or so, several vendors including VCE, the uneasy coalition of EMC, Cisco and VMware, Dell, and NetApp, have announced prepackaged cloud hardware stacks. On the surface the idea is appealing to enterprise IT infrastructure teams unprepared for the cloud revolution. However, as companies quickly found out, there is a big difference between dropping in a rack of hardware and building a productive enterprise cloud infrastructure. Since a primary cloud objective is hardware and software abstraction, more vendors will be developing infrastructure architectures tolerant of commodity hardware and supportive of transparent upgrades.

VMware Cloud gets it right – All indications are that 2013 will be the year that VMware finally gets it right after years of passing virtualization off as cloud. Enterprises that have been patiently waiting for a full suite of cloud features and tools will be rewarded with a system that will be expensive (what else is new), but actually delivers the goods.

Cloud Tools mature – With more offerings than ever from startups and mature companies alike, the market for sophisticated tools will be heating up as companies realize that they need orchestration, brokering, PaaS and cloud management suites. There will be lots of activity, new offerings, acquisitions, and of course, the inevitable hype.

About the Author
Beth Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, Inc., focused on delivering solutions to help enterprises leverage the efficiencies of cloud architectures and technologies. Previously, Ms. Cohen was the director of engineering IT for BBN Corporation, where she was involved with the initial development of the Internet, working on some of the hottest networking and web technology protocols in their infancy.

Making employees buy their own IT tools sounds like a crazy idea.  Thirty years ago, IT systems were so expensive that most access was through a dumb terminal, which was essentially nothing more than a session screen that allowed you to type in commands that were sent to the computer.   The computer was of course housed in some data center attended by tens of administrators day and night.  Then the PC – remember it is not called the Personal Computer for nothing — revolution of the 1990’s shifted the paradigm again, so that each user had their own software on their own system.  The corporate systems were still accessed through special terminal emulation software, but Microsoft got fat on selling millions of Windows and Office licenses to their enterprise customers.

Over the past 40 years nobody has questioned the wisdom of having a company purchase and control the hardware and software that employees use to do their jobs.  The wide availability and acceptance of consumer devices is opening up the opportunity of resetting the equation again.  It is not only possible, but there are many benefits from taking this approach.  There are precedents in the construction industry.  Most construction workers are expected to bring their own tools.  It makes perfect sense when working with dangerous equipment.  You want to be completely comfortable with the tools so you can focus on doing your job well.  This even extends into the engineering and architectural professions; I have a complete set of drafting tools from my years as a Registered Architect.

From the enterprise perspective, support costs can be substantially reduced.  Keeping track of thousands of devices is a known exercise in futility.  A major broadcasting organization finally paid for an inventory of their workers’ systems a few years ago and found an extra 3000 undocumented systems in the organization.  Another company had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about employee owned devices and now has to semi-support about 11,000 of them.

From the employees’ perspective, using a single device that is used for both home and work, means eliminating nerd belt syndrome – two or more devices hanging from their waist or taking up space in carrying bags.  There is nothing worse than hearing a ring from one of the devices and trying to figure out which one needs to be answered!

Rather than attempting to halt the demand, the smarter path is to embrace BYOD’s by providing a safe and secure framework for their use.  This framework should have two complementary components: a BYOD policy and the technology framework and administration software to enforce it.  An official corporate BYOD policy would not be dissimilar to the corporate security policy.  To make it easier, some companies just incorporate their BYOD device policies directly into their standard security policy that all employees are expected to adhere to.  The key to successful enforcement is the implementation of the proper MDM software.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

You would think that cloud technology would have standardized long time ago.  While network standards that shape the Internet have been widely accepted throughout the industry, cloud standards have had a much slower adoption path.  Sadly the current state of cloud standards is, after 15 years, still far less mature than it ought to be.  As cloud infrastructure technology matures, increased interest by the enterprise and emerging vendors is driving a renewed effort to create viable standards that will benefit everyone.

For companies looking for integration and the capability to build hybrid clouds, various standards and proprietary and open APIs have been proposed to provide interoperability up and down the three layers of the cloud stack.  The first and so far only, cloud-oriented standard that has been ratified is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which was approved in September 2010 after three years of processing by the DMTF.  OVF’s open packaging and distribution format offers some platform independence by allowing migration between some platforms, but it does not provide all the tools needed for full cloud interoperability.

I think we can all agree that everyone benefits from technology standards in the long-term – the operative word is long-term.  You would think that everyone would agree that cloud infrastructure technology standards should be given high priority, but creating compelling proprietary systems and discouraging standards gives early adopter companies competitive advantage in the short-term.  Think about Amazon and VMware’s vast technology and market leads in the cloud services and enterprise infrastructure systems respectively.  They have little motivation to support any standards that have the potential to undercut their monopoly market positions.

Users of cloud are asking when will cloud computing standards mature enough so that more companies will feel comfortable implementing cloud architectures and using cloud services without feeling locked in.  Ironically, while the commercial cloud offerings have been growing, built on the very standards that created the Internet itself, Amazon and others have been reluctant to publish their architectures.  Application Programming Interfaces (API), which hide the underlying architecture, are all well and good, but they do not guaranty true interoperability.  Downstream vendors quickly find that they need to build API interfaces for all the different services they need to support; adding significantly to the development and maintenance costs.  To address this and transparently transfer workloads among the different vendor based on predefined business rules, there needs to be much more comprehensive standards.

One obvious question to ask is if there is an opportunity for the commercial cloud systems to become standards.  After all, there have been precedents where formerly proprietary formats, such as VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) which was developed by VMware, have become de facto standards simply by being widely adopted by the industry.  One could even argue that platforms such as Amazon’s AWS are already standards.  However, as many companies have found to their chagrin, while it has a vast variety of services, easy to use tools, and a significant technological head start on the competition, it is more of a cloud world roach motel.  Lots of companies have found it easy to get applications running quickly, but changing providers or taking the applications back in-house as requirements change is fraught with unexpected perils.  Amazon’s backing of Eucalyptus does not address that problem directly, but it does offer a viable option for companies that want to build what Amazon euphemistically calls, on-premise services.

In conclusion, the good news is that the cloud industry is finally reaching consensus that the time to build cloud interoperability standards is long overdue.   The biggest need remains for interoperability standards to allow virtual machines to be migrated between clouds transparently and for more robust hybrid cloud solutions.  For the moment companies that want to use multiple platforms or a mix of public and private options are stuck with complex architectures and emerging orchestration tools such as enStratus and Rightscale to bridge the gap.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

The 2012 MIT CIO symposium purported theme was the untethered enterprise.  Ironically for all the recent media buzz, there was little discussion of untethered enterprises, or even much mention of mobile at all.  Only one panel was slated to cover the topic, but that discussion quickly devolved into a tactical discussion of IT/vendor relationships and SLA’s.  That doesn’t mean that there was no discussion of mobile devices, just few of the in-depth conversations about how the enterprise can best incorporate emerging technologies that I expect from this usually forward thinking and informative conference. Reading between the lines, the enterprise is not quite ready to tackle these difficult considerations.

Very few companies are creating the holistic enterprise mobility strategy that is needed to drive real business advantage.  To put this all into perspective, an informal conference survey revealed that less than a third of the attendees had an enterprise BYOD policy in place today.  Some simply were letting their employees set the standards.  For one company this has resulted in far too many employees with two devices on their desks (one company issued and the other a BYOD of their own choice), and 11K unsupported iPads on their network.  That CIO wryly admitted that maybe it was time for their IT department to address the issue, if for no other reason than they were wasting millions on underused computer resources.

The push to add mobility is coming from both the top and the bottom of the organizations.  For every executive with their hot smartphone, there are 10 employees with three tablets.  However, IT is responding by pushing mobile apps out the door without a good understanding that mobile is a game changing strategy that takes the organization from the traditional top-down IT approach that has been fashionable in recent years back to a bottom up consumer driven initiative. Of course, this is completely runs counter to the traditional IT mindset.  As long as there is a disconnect between the demands of the workers and the services provided by IT, shadow IT will continue to remain a strong force in the enterprise.

From the technology perspective, while enterprise mobility has been around for 20 years in some form or another, the underlying technology to support the mobile apps is still quite brittle.  We are relying on a telecom infrastructure that isn’t fully capable of supporting millions of mobile endpoints.  Because mobility is primarily a device driven technology, it is completely dependent on the infrastructure.  The IT organization is better off getting into the way-back machine and treating them as dumb terminals.  The good news is that mobility security is finally being taken seriously.  Clearly there are some continuing issues that need to be addressed, but the technology and standards are there to make smartphones and tablet secure enough for even government standards.

Several times during the conference, the downsides of hyper-connectivity came up.  One panelist noted an interesting recent trend where formerly plugged-in 20-somethings were choosing to disconnect as they ramped up their careers and realized that separating their private and work lives was a sensible idea.  Several others commented on the need to provide a work environment that is attractive to the tech savvy worker, but old expectations of 100% worker availability is wearing thin.  Many American companies are realizing what the rest of the world has known forever, just because you can touch your workers 24 hours a day, doesn’t mean that you should.  There is an increasing awareness that for sanity if nothing else, you need to apply reasonable business etiquette for worker communications.  My only comment is that after living the 7/24 IT worker life for 20 years this revelation couldn’t come any sooner for me.

What I realized at the end of the day was that mobile and untethered is just a red herring.  The new generation of users sees it for what it really is, shared ubiquitous access to data in the cloud.   For that to succeed It has to be dirt simple and it has to be a thin client service that delivers the functionality that the users need.   That is not so hard, is it?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

The widespread adoption of technology at the consumer level is having profound and unexpected effects on enterprise IT. After years of IT stagnation caused by a combination of economic pressures and outsourcing, the adoption of consumer technology has been a breath of fresh air for some companies and a shock to others. For example, seemingly every corporate executive is demanding the latest tablet computer, but the casual use of mobile devices to view and transmit corporate IP is worrying to the business risk and governance folks.

At the very least, bringing consumer technology into the enterprise can ironically discourage internal IT innovation; because innovation generally means some risk and most enterprises are generally risk-adverse. Consumer innovations like mobile devices can be disruptive technologies, but they also represent a significant risk to the corporate view of itself as a self-contained entity. This factor has both been for the positive, when hard pressed IT departments embrace the outside help these battle tested technologies represent, and for the negative, when IT has dug in its heels with a “not invented here” attitude. This conflict is clear as the pendulum swing back to decentralized or bottom up IT has corporate IT struggling to keep up with the rapid proliferation of cloud technologies.

100% of all enterprises are using SaaS applications whether the IT function knows it or not, as business managers with credit cards take back their applications by leveraging easy access to SaaS and cloud development environments. This can be seen as a positive trend as the business units take on the responsibility for supporting their own IT requirements using (public or private) cloud technologies as the underlying infrastructure. One can argue that is where it has always belonged because they are able to response to the needs of the business far faster. On the other hand, the loss of centralized control and governance represents a certain amount of inefficiency and introduces significant risk at the enterprise level. As business units take over the applications, do you really know where your corporate data is?

Another worrying trend that will hinder the ability for the enterprise to incorporate promising consumer technologies is the erosion of skills and that innovative spark that is needed to drive their adoption. Years of outsourcing and off-shoring have battered the core technical skills of corporate IT as the role has moved increasing back towards being viewed as a costly utility by enterprise business managers who have little patience or interest in IT as a strategic asset. As corporate IT has evolved into vendor managers rather than drivers of innovation, essential skills such as systems architects and senior network engineers have disappeared. I recently worked with a major corporate IT organization that had been relying on their hardware vendors to manage their networks so long that their internal staff networking skills were so atrophied that they did not have a single person on staff who knew how to design an IP addressing scheme for their new cloud implementation. The long term effects of corporate IT downsizing and outsourcing of core functions has meant that IT departments have often been ill-prepared for the challenges of the introduction of consumer technologies that requires different approaches to the organization and support processes.

I have painted a pessimistic picture for corporate IT, but there is hope. The real innovation is happening at the edges of the enterprise as smart, creative business managers take up the challenge to modernize and drive real business value from IT by using the tools they have become comfortable with. Smart IT departments can recapture the technology leadership role by seeking out promising new consumer technologies and integrating them into the enterprise IT portfolio before they get that dreaded surprise support call from the business unit!

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

Years ago, Fred Tuffile, my entrepreneurship professor at Bentley University once said the biggest advantage that new start-up companies have over established businesses is a blank piece of paper.  They might not have any money or customers, but they do have some ideas and a capability for innovation.  Typically, as companies grow and mature over time, they develop processes, bureaucracies and the dreaded, “that’s not the way we do it here” attitude.  Things do not always need to end up this way.  The companies that do maintain an innovative culture consistently out perform their more conservative counterparts.  With the right sponsorship and support from management, it is possible to create a culture that nurtures and encourages innovation in IT and all areas of the business.

At the recent MHT – New England CIO Innovation Summit, unlike the buttoned down MIT CIO Symposium a few months ago, the panelists were all sending a clear message that businesses need to embrace innovation throughout the organization.  Bill Oakes the CIO of the City of Boston, found that even the most traditional cultures are accepting of innovation when the benefits are clear to the rank and file city workers.  Tsvi Gal, the keynote speaker, noted that 85% of IT services are the same across all organizations, but it is the last 15% that are the critical differentiators.  Think of the cloud as a way to make that 85% of the IT infrastructure completely transparent, so that the corporate IT resources that really know the business can concentrate on the 15% that really delivers business value.

No matter where you are on the corporate cultural spectrum, it is possible to drive innovative thinking.  The key is to work at different levels of the organization simultaneously.  If the executive management is actively encouraging an innovative culture, even the most hide-bound staff will catch the excitement.  At the other end of the spectrum, those skunk works projects that bubble up from the groups of smart engineers continually generate 80% of the new ideas in a company.  Those groups are creating the future products.  If they are not nurtured within the corporate structure, they will eventually take their good ideas someplace else or strike out on their own.  You need corporate executives to support smart staff so they can be creative and innovative with in the enterprise ecosystem, and the smart innovators need to know they are supported.  Together you will take over the world.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

“Everything is mobile, everything is in the cloud.”

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium the theme was Beyond the Crossroads, the intersection of cloud computing, social media and mobile applications.  On the surface, the connection with these three themes would seem obvious to a technology savvy audience.  As proven over the past 150 years, first mover advantage can offer lasting benefits for a company that is smart about taking educated risks.  You would think that the enterprise would be embracing cloud and mobile technologies that have proven to be so successful in the consumer market.

However after spending a day listening to industry leader CIO’s primarily in the technology sector, what struck me was how much these supposedly leading lights in technology were stuck in the old school not invented here mentality.  The most exciting technology I saw all day was at the Innovation Showcase held long after most of the 900 attendees had left for the day.  Too bad, because these companies, such as Hadapt , a company that is creating the next generation of distributed database tools, and Apperian, a company building tools for managing enterprise mobile applications in the cloud, are demonstrating that there is plenty of room for innovation for the enterprise beyond the crossroads.

Meanwhile back at the main program, the discussion in the keynote panel on Opportunities and Strategies in the Digital Business World revolved around how the CIO needs to be thinking about how they can become the CEO of the company.  In the companies I have seen, you do not get to be in the top spot by being bold and innovative, rather a demonstrated ability to cut costs and produce short-term gains for investors wins every time.

According to Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-founder, Hubspot,  ”Cloud and mobile is not the future, it is a couple of years ago.  IT needs to be deflationary, destructive and disruptive.”  The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new modern flat organization by leveraging the cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways.  Instead the reality is that real innovation happens at the edges in the marketing dept, etc., or more often, completely outside of the typical enterprise where conformity and process thinking is encouraged over creativity and originality.  The Cloud moves IT from a capital intensive function to an operational expense activity.  The venture folks understand that paradigm; no right minded startup today is building an internal IT infrastructure.  At the same time, the typical corporate CIO is more challenged by the business manager with a credit card and a grunge against the poor service they have been getting from the IT function.

The dilemma is how can you pull innovation into the IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern understanding of IT at the enterprise is focused on operational excellence and cost control?  Innovation is the marriage of the technology and organization change.  You do not see innovation in IT about 98% of the time because there has been zero input to how the IT tools are actually going to be used.  The trick is creating ways for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework.  The new tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?  What do you think?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

Previously I touched on the nature of the IT manager’s role and how it is changing in this new world of sophisticated service delivery, the virtual IT organization, global right sourcing, and a plethora of emerging on-line business models and IT services.  How is it possible for an IT manager to maintain currency in technology while building business skills that can be applied to delivering better IT services to their organization?  To achieve business excellence, what is needed is a different understanding of the both role of IT within the organization and how IT has transformed business in general.

Once IT is a commodity as an IT manager, keeping up on the latest technical skills is like chasing rainbows – there is no pot of gold, just more rainbows.  Despite what Nicholas Carr said in 2003 about IT not mattering anymore, in fact most people agree that it matters a great deal.  However, why and how it matters has changed.  Since IT is no longer a competitive advantage, but a requirement for any successful business, it is vital that IT managers gain understanding and skills in the fundamental business processes of their market segment or industry.  In my thinking, this needs to take precedence over technical skills.  Ironically, in many ways we are moving away from the IT specialist roles of the past 20 years and back towards industry subject matter experts who have enough IT knowledge to apply it in creative ways.  The combination of an expertise in a specific vertical industry and a general technical understanding is far more desirable to industry hiring managers than a deep proficiency in IT skills.  This works because in a labor market where general IT technical skills are easily obtained for relatively little money from a worldwide labor market and the majority of IT systems and services are commodities in the cloud, the real value comes from a deep understanding of how to apply IT to business problems.  Leave the deep technical projects to the IT specialists and outsourcers, but use business skills to apply IT to solve business problems and advance organizational objectives.

The best way to gain those skills is to concentrate on learning business skills.  What people often forget is the business skills are not just what you learn in school, although taking business classes in finance, project management and/or business processes will certainly help.  The more important business skills that must truly be learned on the job are the so called soft skills, such as project management, organization and general management, sales and leadership.  With this combination, an IT manager will be able to stay competitive in the new business world order.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

Question: As businesses become increasingly sophisticated, how can IT knowledge workers gain the business knowledge to remain competitive?

Part one was a discussion of the reasons why IT knowledge workers need to understand the businesses they deliver services it, we will now dive into how the CIO, as the person who has the best understanding of the business challenges in an organization can drive that change in attitude.  Most change occurs from the top down, which means that CIO’s, must lead the shift in perspective from technology to business in their organizations.

To get started, create a vision for the future where IT professionals are champions for applying technology in your business.  This image serves as a vivid picture of a positive future where the IT department and all IT professionals enjoy a strong reputation for helping the organization use technology to serve its customers significantly better than the competition.  This is not just your ideal but the vision for all IT professionals.  This will create a common purpose and an emotional connection of each IT professional in your organization.

If the reputation of your IT organization is not strong, convince an influential business colleague to partner with you to enhance IT’s value through their increased business knowledge.  The success of this partnership will encourage other business leaders to work more closely with IT for mutual benefit for everyone.  Hold a meeting to unveil your vision for the future and brainstorm ideas to bring it about with the entire IT department AND your influential business colleague.  You and your business colleague must be prepared to answer questions about this vision and your joint commitment to make it happen.  You will want all employees to contribute ideas during the brainstorming session, so invite a good facilitator to help  get everyone contributing to the discussion.  Use your training department’s expertise and knowledge of techniques for accelerating learning and knowledge transfer.  Remember to consider all ideas and get the employees to decide which are best to move ahead.  Produce a “roadmap” of activities and intentional actions to increase business knowledge in an aggressive but achievable timeframe.  This will reinforce your commitment AND show everyone the path forward.

One CIO who I know created an “academy” to change the mindset of his department and increase the value to his $2 billion business services company.  He partnered with his training department to develop a four month program for all IT personnel and used training, mentoring, role-playing and roundtable discussion to foster learning and skill development.

There are myriad ways to enhance business knowledge.  The key is to stimulate the desire in each IT practitioner to do so AND implement a predictable plan that employees can trust to occur.  Do not forget to incorporate incentives (recognition and rewards) for expanding business knowledge.   Remember, you need a climate of trust within the IT department and beyond IT to achieve success.  To quote Peter Drucker from his from his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century (HarperCollins, 1999): “Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust.  The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another.”  Work with your IT professionals to strengthen their understanding of their business colleagues and increase IT’s value to your company.

About the Author

Robert Johnson, Director of Product Marketing at Atrion Networking Corporation where he’s responsible for market analysis, developing new products and co-leading the company’s managed services business line. Robert is a veteran of the IT industry having held executive strategy and marketing positions with CGI Inc., Deloitte Consulting and Digital Equipment Corp.