This speech was delivered as the keynote speech at the 2012 Software Architecture Symposiums International (SASI) "Cloud Architecture Without The Hype" conference. The purpose of this presentation was to show that IT has faced major changes in the past and that cloud computing is another major change. The impact on what IT staff will do in the new era of cloud computing is then explored...
2. A Brief History Of Outsourcing…
A Company
Human
Legal
Resources
Accounting Marketing
Mail
Sales
Delivery
Data Plant
Processing Maintenance
Security IT
3. What Does IT Do Today?
1. Provide IT help desk support
2. Create backups of mission critical business data
3. Apply patches to workstations and servers
4. Maintain firewalls, network routers, wireless routers
5. Design, build, and maintain computer networks
6. Plan and replace / upgrade aging equipment
7. Build and maintain internal and external web sites for the business
8. Maintain the email system including creating new email accounts
9. Install and maintain printers
10. Provide network security services
11. Maintain, and backup databases
12. Manage IT vendor contracts and evaluate new vendors
13. Evaluate new technology to determine how it would impact the business
14. Create databases
15. Write custom code to support business functions
Image Credit; http://vimeo.com/33717632
4. Image Credit: http://fairwindsweb.com/free-reputation-management-tools.html Image Credit: http://futuregiraffes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-tips-updates/revenge-of-the-nerds/
No Free Software
We’re Too Different
What’s Wrong With IT?
We Say “No” – A Lot
We Get Blamed For Failures
Image Credit: http://marchforfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/say-no-to-the-propaganda-offensive-against-tibet/
5. What Is Going To Happen If
IT Doesn’t Change?
Outsourcing /
Value of IT? Costs Consultants
Offshoring
Technical Business
Complexity Complexity
IT Department
7. What Would A Solution Do?
IT needs to have the ability to grow without having to…
1. Invest In New Infrastructure 2. Train New Personnel
3. License New Software
8. What Needs To Go Into A Solution?
Provide Implement Portable
General-Purpose SOA Workloads
Computing
9. A Solution: The Software Part
1. False: Web based applications won’t need any IT staff
2. False: The web is free, isn’t it?
3. False: Web app performance is never a problem
4. False: Security is no big deal
5. True: Software development speeds up by 4x (Salesforce.com)
Image credit: http://www.iclbd.com/
10. A Solution: The Hardware Part
Goal: create an IT infrastructure that is “workload agnostic”:
• Commodity x86 servers
• Single 10G Ethernet connection
• Network convergence around IP
• Converged storage technology
Companies can invest in a whole new class of technologies
for the same cost of maintaining what they already have.
11. A Solution: The People Part
Consultants Project Developers
Managers
Image Credit: http://consultgenie.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/consultant-vs-employees/ Image Credit: http://www.georgiahealth.edu/itss/news/2012april/projectplan.html Image Credit: http://www.skadate.com/blog/skadatecs-com-developers-wanted.html
12. What Will The World Look Like?
Performance
Scalability
Communication
Security Environment
Reuse
Standards
13. The Era Of The Cloud Has Arrived
*: Study by CIO Research Center
Why did any of us go into an IT career in the first place?Getting a degree in business or even in accounting would have been much easier!What the world of IT offered to all of us was change: we knew that we wouldn’t get stuck doing the same old thing over and over again.However, as we’ve all learned by now, change has a dark side.Just when you’ve gotten very good at something, along comes change and suddenly your set of skills don’t matter and you have to start all over again.We find ourselves standing on the edge of one of those big changes once again. We have to make a choice: do we fight it or do we go with it?If we choose to fight it, then we can hold on to the skills that we have today with both hands and keep finding companies that will employee us until finally all of those companies have gone away.Or we can face the future and tell it that we want to learn how we can change the world. 1,825 days seems like a long time, but it’s really just 5 years. I’m going to show you how you can change your world for the better in just 5 short years…
Outsourcing started during the Industrial revolution in the 1700’s. Manufactures used external suppliers for tasks that were essential, but of a secondary nature.1990’s – Firms started to outsource the functions that were required to run the business (secondary services), but which were not related to the core services provided by the business. This included such departments as: accounting, HR, data processing, mail, security, and plant maintenance.Most firms agree that they should not outsource their core competency: those tasks that give a company it’s strategic advantage or make it unique. Many of these core competency functions are defined as being the ones that allow a company to get close to its customers.1989 – Eastman Kodak outsourced its IT departmentThings that no longer matter when it comes to outsourcing: distance / time / cultural barriers
I’m pretty sure that just like me, you consider the IT function to be an important part of any company. However, it does beg the question: how important is IT?Perhaps we can answer this question by taking a look at just exactly what an IT department does for a business.The role of IT has evolved over the years. What IT started out doing, processing data for the company using mainframes, has evolved.I sat down and tried to think of just exactly what I though that an IT department did. I was able to come up with the following list of 15 functions. Can you think of any things that an IT department does that is not on my list?Where things tend to get really scary is when we think about what tasks an IT department does that are non-core. Those that can be outsourced.Of the 15 functions that I could think of, only 4 are what you would call “core” – the rest could be done by any 3rd party firm.This means that the IT department is at risk of going away. What happens next may be determined based on how the rest of the company views the IT department…
We’re Too DifferentIT staff actually enjoy being different from everyone elseIn many cases, IT does not have to work with the rest of the companyHowever, help desk services and others require business and IT to come togetherSlow IT response to business problems causes a riff to occurIT people are hired for technical skills, not interpersonal skillsWe Say “No” A lotIT has to say “no” to request quite frequentlyBudget and time limitations require IT to push back on requestsConsumer technology has surpassed what is available at the officeEmployees are tempted to go rogue and end up causing major security problemsNo Free SoftwareFree downloads that are not permitted cause a riff (e.g. IE 9)What about compatibility issues? What about testing?We Get Blamed For FailuresEasy for CEOs to blame IT for big failuresAll too often there were people and process issues that didn’t get changedDid people put information into the systems so that it could manage it properly?
I don’t like change and I’m willing to guess that you don’t like it either.What would happen if an IT department said that it wasn’t going to change? Forget this cloud stuff, we’re going to stay the same.We can say for sure that technical things are going to become more complex: this technical thing is going to rely on that technical thing.We know that businesses are going to become more complex: longer supply chains, more outsourcing, more complex products and servicesBoth of these increasing complexities are going to make supporting the company much more difficult for a traditional IT department to do.Outsourcing: establishing servers and coordinating the exchange of requirements and completed work with multiple firmsValue of IT?: IT costs will continue to increase as more staff has to be added in order to keep up with the increasing requests for faster serviceCosts: the cost of equipment, software, and 24x7 personnel will continue to rise even if the level of support stays the same as it currently isConsultants: as software tool and network design complexities grow, additional consultants will have to be brought in to help for longer times
In the end, no matter how much time energy and effort are put in to improving the traditional IT department, the two most critical flaws will still remain.First IT will always be too expensive. Would you like that change to be made? That will be $1M. A traditional IT department by necessity has a great deal of overhead and therefore the expense of that overhead needs to be spread around to everything that the department works on.Secondly, the IT department will forever be too slow. As the world has started to move faster and faster, IT will forever be constrained by the simple fact that every action may have many unintended consequences and therefore IT can never react as quickly as the rest of the company wants them to.As we move more and more into an age where information rules and the company that can process the most information in the least amount of time will win, the demands on the IT department will only grow.Being too expensive and too slow today with no clear solution to either of these problems on the horizon seems to spell doom for the IT department. Clearly, being a CIO is a rough job…
If we could create a perfect solution to the problems that an IT department is facing today, what would it look like?Don’t bother constraining yourself to any one future solution, let’s dream the big dream and allow our imaginations to soar without being limited.Let’s start this exercise by considering one critical problem that every IT department will be facing: they’ll need to grow as the demands on the IT department continue to increase.If your IT department is growing, what do you not want to have to do?The first is to buy more boxes – buying infrastructure is like having a baby, it’s fun to do but once it shows up you’re going to have to send it to college and that’s going to get expensive.The next thing that you don’t want to have to do is to be continuously investing in a lot of expensive training for your staff. This is expensive to do and you’ll always be shorthanded when people are in training.Finally, you’ve got to get out of the business of licensing and then installing new software. Yes you want your customers to have access to the software; however, you don’t want to be in the business of supporting it
Let’s take our mind game just a little bit further. If you were going to design the perfect IT infrastructure for a company, what would it look like?I would propose that it would have three major components.The first is a general purpose computing infrastructure. What this would mean is that all of your computing resources would look the same. It would not matter where you ran your applications because all computing platforms could be used to do any task.Secondly, the too rarely heard term “SOA” would be used more. What this simply means is that services-oriented architecture needs to return. What this means is that common functionality is created once and then reused many times. This can be applications to allow users to log on, along with messaging, security, and database access. Finally, all applications would need to be coded so that they were portable. This means that you could pick them up from where they are currently running and then plop them down anywhere else on the company’s general purpose computing infrastructure and they would still run.
Web based applications won’t need any IT staff:For a business that uses many cloud apps, internal IT staff is still needed to manage and integrate the services. Some IT managers may start to see themselves more as vendor managers. These "traditional" IT pros might find their roles shifting to business unit support, making sure every employee has the right cloud tools to do his or her job. Another obvious point is that, over time, as technology resources shift from customers to vendors, the vendors will have a greater need for IT pros, creating more jobs on the vendor side. The web is free, isn’t it?:Licensing is not the only cost of using a cloud service. There are also hidden legal costs, because there is generally an increased risk profile when you move applications from the enterprise data center to the cloud. Storing data in the cloud brings new security and litigation risks.Web app performance is never a problem: Even if your Internet bandwidth is solid, other factors can degrade performance. as the number of connections to a cloud service goes up, response times also go up. This is perhaps not surprising, but some of the response times lagged to as much as three to five seconds.Speeds up: this is true for a number of reasons. All of the tools that a developer needs are immediately available to them and a fixed ecosystem where everything works together has been created for them to use.
Just imagine having a large computing environment where every server was the same.What this means is that when the end of the month or the end of the year arrives and the company’s processing needs double or even triple, you have the boxes that you can throw at the problem.Maintenance and support become much simpler.You start to get the benefits of economy of scale.Training your staff and performing routine servicing becomes much easier to do.Spare parts and disaster recovery planning become much easier to handle.
ConsultantsIT professionals are expensiveToo many experts leads to too many “No’s”Traditional IT administration and support functions will be outsourced to 3rd party consultantsFirms will rent out data center capacity and IT professionals to deploy, manage, and troubleshootProject ManagersMost IT workers at traditional companies will be project managersLocated not in IT, but in different business unitsBusiness analysis who will help to make good technology decisionsGather requirementsEvaluate new technologiesPOC for vendors and consultantsDevelopersDevelopers, programmers, and coders will be responsible for creating web-based apps that work smoothly.Will develop mobile apps: native based and web-based mobile appsMore power shifts from those who deploy apps to those who build apps
So what will this IT world of tomorrow look like – it’s going to be different from the world that we’re living in right now.Performance has always been a critical part of any IT shop; however, now it’s no longer going to be in our hands. We’re going to have to monitor it, detect slow downs, and then work with cloud providers to fix it.Scalability is critical. Not only are we going to have be able to expand quickly, but we’re also going to have to be able to shrink when the need is gone.Communications which have always been important will now be crucial. If we can’t communicate with our servers, then we’re dead in the water.It goes without saying that security is very important. Now we’ll have to work with 3rd party cloud providers to make sure that we stay safe.Environment decisions that are made will have far reaching and long lasting impacts. Do we model our IT environment after someone else or do we define our own?Standards will show us the way. But we’re going to have to be able to make some tough decisions when the standards are lagging our needs.Reuse becomes even more important in order to ensure productivity of developers and security of applications.
It’s not just IT that is driving the move into the cloud.What makes things so very interesting is that the CEOs are now starting to get involved. The magazines that CEOs read and the shows that they watch have taught them to expect great things from the arrival of cloud computing. This chart shows that it starts with an expectation of reduced IT costs and then it really gets interesting.The arrival of cloud computing is no longer a question of “if” but rather a question of “when”.
The skills and the certifications that have gotten you this far will not take you to where you need to go to in the future.Yes, having IT skills will still be important, but having the right IT skills will be what really matters.Understanding how clouds are built, how they work, and how to create and move things around inside of one or more clouds will be the new currency of the coming age of IT.It’s going to be your responsibility to identify what trends will be with us over the long haul and to avoid topical fads.Once you know what’s important, it’s going to be up to you and nobody else to get yourself trained on everything that has to do with that service or tool. Nobody else is going to take care of you.The good news is that once you become an expert in this new era of cloud computing, you’ll become a valuable employee who will never need to look for your next job – it will come and find you.
I’m almost done, but before I wrap up, let’s talk about you.If you really want to change the world, then you’ve got to get busy – time’s running out and you’ve got a lot to do.You can make a difference and you can be remembered long after your time on this planet is over.The first thing that you need to do it to accept that the era of cloud computing has arrived. No, we don’t know all of the answers yet, but we are getting much better at asking the right questions.The second thing that you need to do if you want to change the world is to make sure that you make many new friends. Cloud computing is all about moving quicker to better meet customer needs. That means that you are going to have to know who your customers are and what they really want from the IT department.Finally, you need to change the world. Take the time to study just exactly what cloud computing is and you’ll know more than most of us do. Use your new knowledge to help your company to make the right decisions as they prepare to move their IT tasks into the cloud. Congratulations, the world is yours to change…