Decentralised Thinking

Every week I engage with organisations of all shape and size, from a wide range of sectors, UK and International. Most conversations centre of cloud, (no surprise given my remit), but increasingly conversations have taken a far more diverse route.

Cloud strategies come in all shapes and sizes, some are genuinely well thought through, planning around suitable migration candidates, hybrid aspirations and using new elements of PAAS architecture. Many however materialise from an interesting mix of external pressure and a desire to be “on-cloud”, or at least moving that way. Most interesting of all is the increase of cloud projects and development teams that now sit completely external of any central I.T function, marketing, sales and customer service teams are adopting cloud despite policy and ahead of many core strategy reviews.

One recent example brought home the stark examples of decentralised behaviour. The discussion went something like this...

I.T chap; “cloud”, yes well we did experiment with a few workloads, its all a bit random really, we run three data centres, a mix of old and new, lots of legacy environments which run ok, so cloud has only been used for a few none critical systems, bit of a learning experience really. “We’ve tried AWS, some Azure, much the same really. We haven’t decided how much effort we put into things if I’m honest”, maybe in a year or two.

Having done my research before the meeting, I had qualified details behind a wider group activity for application development driven by sales and marketing, including new web environments, cloud native data-science environments and CRM. So when circling the conversation back, “tell me again, cloud”? You mentioned it was a bit random? However I’ve read 48% of your new growth revenue looks to be web based, with mobile apps now adding to the value. How has that impacted your team and priorities?

Then came the revelation, cloud as it turns out had grown from specific business units, I.T was originally asked to support the initiative but had explained that core projects for the next year were already committed and that cloud was only in the experimental stage. Clearly undeterred the sales and marketing team went off and located some budget, found basic skills existed inside their team and the rest is history, cloud and bit of Development for good measure was now delivering new business growth.

This type of conversation is all too common, often with the best of intentions I.T sparks the fire that leads to a complete shift in I.T policy, I.T has become decentralised, decisions are often made regarding technology that may well start small and can be deemed insignificant, however its incredible how many of these small systems, living in the cloud become all too critical. The shadow I.T syndrome is nothing new, what is changing however is the pace at which the approach is accepted as the norm, also the levels at which it can reach. A little bit of cloud spend on a credit card here and there has become a whole lot more, impacting service design, architectural decisions and ultimately support overheads.

My take, as with all things running an I.T operations team has become a multi-faceted role, part technician, part political, part pragmatist. The reality is that decisions today regarding I.T strategy are influenced from so many new angles its almost impossible to centralise all technology-based functions. Some core aspects like security, networking and data centre remain relatively core, however the dynamics of business are changing, user attitudes towards legacy I.T functions, the expectations are higher, lead times for new services are shorter whilst policy and governance in traditional forms are seen as prohibitive.

So what to do? a few recommendations I would offer include:

·      Create an I.T innovation role- It may sound like a grandiose title, but putting it simply, someone needs to provide an interface to the various business units. If I.T’s only interaction with teams across the business is to fix something, you are for the most part viewed as a repair function, not an enabler, or indeed influence.

·      Set up shop- Cloud, data-science, machine-learning, A.I will change everyone’s life and work role regardless of its adoption speed. New technology just happens, the choice to make is to either embrace change and look for genuine value or hunker down and carry on with patching and fixing. Giving I.T a new purpose takes real focus, ultimately its people who make for a good experience, not just technology, head space must be created within the team to promote new thinking as a positive. Regular workshops, blue-sky thinking, competitive analysis are all healthy means of distilling good ideas into fresh work streams.

·      Cultural attitude- Circling back to the start of this note, remember the dismissive response from I.T that sparked the “shadow” services into life. Regardless of committed plans, day to day pressure and in-flight work, I.T needs to adopt a better open-door approach. As the gap between agile, cloud-first solutions and legacy technology with all of its ITIL, ITSM and TOGAF policy widens so will the pressure mount on I.T to offer more rapid, quick to market answer. The cultural shift has happened, younger workforce arrives with an expectation of technology born from mobile and cloud, the prospect of waiting 8 weeks for a VM to be provisioned, indeed asking “what is a VM”? Is a completely alien concept to them. Team construct needs to evolve, not just through skills and certifications, but also cultural attitude and the approach towards the business.