Chapter 90. The Cloud Is Not About the Cloud
Ken Corless
When our clients say they want the cloud, I don’t believe they really want the cloud.1 What they really want is a whole new way of delivering technology and IT to power their business. In other words, their technology organizations want APIs and DevOps and Agile and loosely coupled systems. They want continuous deployment and autonomics and machine learning and mobile. They want to be Netflix or Instagram or Uber. They want to have two junior employees talk about an idea at lunch and work through the nights and weekends to deploy a new capability that delivers a 5% bump in sales by Monday.
Most of the CIOs of these companies understand that they must fundamentally change the way they run their IT function if they are to fulfill the aspiration that “every company is a technology company.” However, while the cloud can be a catalyst toward breaking the inertia of the old way of running IT, the journey is strewn with challenges.
Many Fortune 500 companies began this journey to the cloud over 10 years ago. They called it private cloud because they were concerned about security, regulations, costs, retooling, and a whole host of other things, so they jumped on the private cloud bandwagon. The least successful of these companies simply slapped the private cloud label on what they were already doing. Others built out new datacenters, perhaps on hyper-converged infrastructure, and virtualized their servers, storage, and networks. Today, however, few are happy with their private cloud outcomes. Many of the more adept companies achieved some real benefits in hardware utilization and costs but others did less well.
Why did these companies not achieve their aspirations? Well, as in previous waves of technology change, they failed to change enough. Rarely will companies succeed with transformational objectives by moving only a single piece of the complex machine that is IT. Moving off the mainframe didn’t do it. Nor did leveraging a cheaper global labor pool. Taking your old “pile of stuff” and pulling one lever of change simply results in a slightly updated pile of stuff.
So what should a company do that is seeking to look, act, and, most importantly, deliver outcomes significantly better? These companies need to realize that it is time to undertake a true, full IT transformation.
Companies have used the term IT transformation liberally in the past decade or so, even when they have only outsourced or labor-arbitraged their old pile of stuff. To fully transform IT, companies need to holistically look at their IT function without fear of breaking some glass.
You’re doing DevOps? How many fewer infrastructure support people do you have?
Love SaaS? Why is your new SaaS team the same size as the old team that supported the legacy app?
You’ve bought into the whole API thing? Do any external parties contribute to your revenue by utilizing your APIs? Do your frontend developers access the backend of their application through the same APIs that other teams are supposed to use?
Stop. Stop now. Rethink your organization, including business interlock. (While you’re there, stop talking about the business and IT as two separate entities.) Reengineer your IT business processes (the business of IT). You must take all of these wonderful, thought-out, intelligent new things that smart technology companies are doing and do them together.
Be bold. Be brave. Risk some failure. Disrupt yourself. Oh, yeah—and move your stuff to the cloud!