DGR: What are some best practices for structuring internal IT teams to ensure that a core infrastructure is maintained?
Lingo: Ultimately, organizations must have a sense of governance and modeling your organization around what the speed to market of the Cloud can provide you, whether you’re talking about process, or data or application functionality and features, requires some level of change management within your IT organization. What that entails is reassessing how your IT team supports the business. From a best practices perspective, it’s about breaking down some of the traditional barriers that might exist in some of the organization’s governance/steering committee models that you’ve applied to projects for decades, and realizing that the business has more than just a navigational role in you utilize the Cloud, and building a Cloud map for utilization of these assets. It’s not a role just as a navigator but as a co-pilot. It’s a classic sitting shoulder-to-shoulder story. Be closer to the business than ever before.
From an IT perspective, it really means that you’re giving up the mentality of the CAPEX budget world where you spend a lot of money on gear and software, but you’re spending that money on people, process and some level of technology that underlies it. That spend it different, so you’ve got to orient your team toward how that spend is different. The best practice focus is to understand the different style of governance that you can provide, how it fits in to corporate culture, and where you need to make sure you bend, but don’t break, the rules. Ultimately it’s about sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the business and making sure they have a seat at the table so that IT can be a center of innovation, and ship things to your internal customers and your partners and vendors which can radically change how IT has been perceived within most organizations.
DGR: What are some of the nuances of the role of IT within a Cloud environment?
Lingo: It’s about becoming a center of innovation instead of a “defender of the castle.” We’ve all seen organizations where the fundamental tenant of their IT organization is rooted in the card-scan entry server room, being on a locked floor kept from the business — physically and logically in a lot of different ways. The Cloud makes all that disappear and suddenly it’s stripped bare. You’ve got to focus on the business and the innovation they are demanding to meet customer needs. Every single CIO right now is pressed to be a business innovator and not just keep the lights on with IT spend. It doesn’t matter if you sit down and talk with CIOs about their focus and their perceptions or if you pick up CIO magazine, you see it right there in bold print.
The modern day CIO is asked to be innovative and be a profit center and not just a cost center. Ultimately that means that the role of IT becomes a business enabler and a strategic asset that’s not just about the black, arcane technology story that has shrouded potential for success over the last few decades. I think that’s a really healthy thing for IT, too. They understand, and have for years, that it’s almost never the technology that fails a project or an application. It’s always the soft stuff around people and process, and the ability to work together, and fundamentally the Cloud environment lets you shift to be more human-focused, which is a really healthy thing for organizations. From our experience with clients, that lends itself, especially in these economic times, to stripping back the stuff that doesn’t provide innovation or value but which keeps the machine turning, whether it’s the same old business paradigms or the same old IT costs. That’s a fundamental difference that companies are really taking advantage of over the last five or six years in increasing utilization of their cloud assets year after year.
DGR: In Hey! You! Get Onto My Cloud, you discuss how companies can deploy new capital quickly and efficiently once the infrastructure is moved to the Cloud. Can you further explain the benefits organizations are realizing?
Lingo: One of the best ways to describe is to give an example from my own career: About six years ago, I was working for a CIO that was cut from the cloth of long-tenured IT. He was well-respected and in the twilight of his career. He had a well thought out enterprise stack, an enterprise model and a plan for anything you could do, whether it was business or technology strategy. There came a point, though, when he was really getting outflanked by the business and their use of Salesforce.com, specifically to use it in a strategic way for business process and marketing programs that were oftentimes ephemeral. They may or may not prove to be long-term approaches to fundamental business challenges, but they needed to be delivered in order to find that out. The “enterprise IT stack” that I was developing and supporting with a team of 30+, couldn’t support the speed-to-market story quickly enough.
They needed something they could turn on, deploy and implement in a week, sometimes within a couple days. There was no way that we could steer a big enterprise application quickly enough to meet their needs. I sat down with the business, saw what they were doing with Salesforce and brought the story to them. I said, “Look, this is the way that you can move this organization in support of our marketing and sales efforts in a completely different direction.” The traditional IT function of the company plainly rejected the idea. They couldn’t understand that the fundamental underpinnings of the technology — the application servers, and the team required to deploy all the physical layers of the gear and infrastructure, and all the software that gets laid out on top of it, couldn’t be deployed quickly enough in innovative ways to respond to business challenges.
That’s the fundamental difference that the Cloud story provides. You can sit down and listen to business problems, examine the opportunities you have to innovate together and get something deployed quickly, and once you deploy it, tweak it and change it until you succeed or fail together quickly so you know that what you’re building is giving you value. If it’s not, chuck it for something altogether new. That’s the thing that companies are able to deploy with their capital much more quickly than they ever could. The Cloud as a concept is focused on “shipping.” Getting your product into the hands of the users who are going to create value with it, early and often. That’s radically different than traditional on-premise systems where it was designed to be hard to ship, to ensure ‘quality’ that often times couldn’t be measured or didn’t provide the value implied anyway. That doesn’t meaning that testing or quality aren’t important. Just the opposite in fact.
Every Astadia customer has a success story that underlies this, whether it’s in cost reduction or revenue enhancement. There’s a realization of what the Cloud environment brings them that causes them to spend more money on it year after year. Every business goes through their own industry challenges, but by and large we see companies in a variety of industries see the value in the spend they’re getting and the return on it in ways that get them to pour gasoline on it and keep buying more licenses, doing new projects. The simplest metric to consider when thinking about how impactful Cloud technologies are for organizations is that more than 50% of our revenue comes from existing clients doing follow-on projects.
DGR: What are some of the biggest misconceptions marketers have about Cloud computing?
Lingo: The simple story is that the Cloud environment is not a silver bullet. If you don’t have the discipline and people in place that know how to communicate effectively, and are subject matter experts in what you’re doing, whether it’s line of business or vertical industry knowledge or the specific function they’re expected to perform, you’re going to have challenges. Look at those levels of communication and focus on them more than ever because you strip away technology aspect of getting the stack in place. That ends up being a big challenge initially on the project. If you’re going to a project where you’re going to house a bunch of data and build a marketing dataset, then lay on marketing automation, traditionally your IT team is going to go away and procure gear and set up environment, then come back months later and say they can’t get the disk yet, but let’s start on the project. Your business strategies might have changed or at the very least you’ve lost precious time waiting to procure or allocate gear. So your ability to compress that and get focus together is a game-changer.
Cloud computing will not help a cover off issues which a company has which poor communication channels in place or lack of shared strategy and vision for their business. This is not a new form of pixie dust that dissolves fiefdoms. What good is all the agility and speed you now have at your disposal, if you have to drag everyone else to the party? Those things are just good project and planning disciplines which we assess and offer steerage around during our Client Readiness phase of a project.
And you can’t go at this half-hearted or halfway. If you take your sales and marketing units to the Cloud, but leave the contact center languishing and tied to on-premise software and procured hardware, you’re not taking advantage of the tremendous access you have to customer feedback.
DGR: You talk about building a roadmap — or “CloudMap” — an exercise that helps establish an organization’s ability to move to the Cloud. What does that look like?
The CloudMap is a guided set of workshops which forces you to really look at your business objectives, business process, data, functionality, and your team to determine how to use known-good solution models, change management strategies and benefit attainment models so that you can move forward with a holistic approach to getting the maximum benefit from your spend on cloud computing environments. It entails what is basically a Cloud Maturity Model assessment of where you are in relation to steps and levels we’ve tabulated from over 5,000 projects with over 2,500 clients over nearly a decade. The process allows you to understand where you sit on the progression levels and what it will take for you to get to a higher level of maturity in line with your business objectives, budgets and personnel. Ultimately, it’s a classic road mapping exercise with a focus on the things which the Cloud can accelerate so that you maximize your spend in the right areas, with the right team members, with a map to own the support and development story so that you can be self-sufficient.
In 2011 it’s time for organizations to take a good hard look in the mirror and say, “You know what? We are who we are. This is what we’re good at; this is what we’re not good at. Let’s not pretend we can do things when that’s only going to obscure what we’re ultimately capable of doing.” If organizations implement this way of thinking, they’ll have a lot more success deploying Cloud technologies and leveraging the investment. And from there they can build on that success to redefine capabilities, behaviors, and attitudes which have a profound impact on your ability to do business in a certain way that maps to your business objectives. It’s classic stuff, and the focus you bring accelerates how you can use to the Cloud to achieve your objectives.
At Mike Lingo’s day job as Chief Technology Officer and SVP, Professional Services at Astadia, he helps companies use the Cloud to transform their businesses. Mike is an internationally recognized speaker in the Cloud and SaaS industries and has over 17 years of application delivery experience with a background in application development, sales force automation, call center solutions, campaign management, business intelligence and project management.
