Bridging the cloud skills gap

Cloud adop­tion is now a ques­tion of when rather than if for most organ­i­sa­tions. How­ev­er, many risk miss­ing out on the full ben­e­fits of as-a-ser­vice IT by fail­ing to devel­op the skills required to exploit the advan­tages of mov­ing their dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy off-premise.

Man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny fore­casts busi­ness­es can gen­er­ate up to $1 tril­lion in added val­ue by 2030 due to the poten­tial of cloud to deliv­er addi­tion­al speed, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, flex­i­bil­i­ty, scale and inno­va­tion, but only if they put the right mea­sures in place. “Cloud offers tremen­dous val­ue, but the ben­e­fits don’t appear mag­i­cal­ly,” says McK­in­sey.

One key ele­ment of this for suc­cess­ful organ­i­sa­tions is devel­op­ing a deep under­stand­ing of the fun­da­men­tal shift from IT as a prod­uct, whether hard­ware or soft­ware, which is bought and often adapt­ed, to IT con­sumed off the peg on a pay-as-you-go basis. This requires a trans­fer in mind­set from pure tech­nol­o­gy to a greater focus on busi­ness out­comes.

“When you start to sell the ser­vice of gain­ing access to some­thing, you change the way of think­ing about what that thing is,” says Dr Alan Brown, pro­fes­sor of dig­i­tal econ­o­my at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Exeter Busi­ness School and for­mer chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at IBM. “You then begin to under­stand the val­ue you receive from it.”

Commercial thinking required

Putting such think­ing into prac­tice is Ran­jit Gill, UK chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer (CIO) of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and health­care multi­na­tion­al McKesson. He has recent­ly over­seen a large-scale imple­men­ta­tion of Salesforce’s soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice sales and mar­ket­ing tools, and is now look­ing to ensure the busi­ness ben­e­fits ful­ly from its cloud invest­ments. 

“Now we have this tech­nol­o­gy, how do we real­ly start to dri­ve val­ue from it? It’s all about under­stand­ing what skillsets we need inter­nal­ly,” he says. For him, a key aspect is bring­ing in and devel­op­ing tal­ent that is “both IT-lit­er­ate and also more com­mer­cial­ly mind­ed”.

Such com­mer­cial think­ing is a nec­es­sary aspect of extract­ing max­i­mum val­ue from agile process­es, as cloud has huge­ly accel­er­at­ed devel­op­ment times and rapid inno­va­tion, says Ed Alford, who was enter­prise CIO and then vice pres­i­dent of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion at ener­gy giant BP until the end of 2020.

“With cloud, with­in maybe two weeks, you can spin up a min­i­mal viable prod­uct with­out spend­ing a lot of mon­ey,” he says. “But then you need to have the con­ver­sa­tion: how much does it cost to scale it? And should we scale it? So it’s the abil­i­ty to change the time­line from deliv­er­ing a fin­ished prod­uct to the busi­ness to doing it in stages. This involves co-cre­ation with the busi­ness, as well as get­ting the tech­nol­o­gy envi­ron­ment up and run­ning.”

For Gill, this means gen­er­at­ing and fos­ter­ing a deep and close rela­tion­ship between IT and the rest of the busi­ness, and IT should nev­er stand alone. “When you do a pro­gramme in an agile way, there’s no such thing as an IT project. If you have that, you’re going to fail,” he says.

Mean­while, there is val­ue in ensur­ing the part­ner­ship between IT and users runs deep in oth­er ways, says Char­lie Forte, CIO at the UK Min­istry of Defence. He believes there are cru­cial lessons to be learnt from the way con­sumer IT uses cloud, par­tic­u­lar­ly around the ben­e­fits of focus­ing on end-users and their needs. 

“Cloud and the jour­ney to cloud sit in the tech­nol­o­gy shift towards the con­sumeri­sa­tion and the com­modi­ti­sa­tion of our under­ly­ing toolsets,” he says. “The tech­nol­o­gy we use in our per­son­al lives is dom­i­nat­ed by themes of per­son­al­i­sa­tion and flex­i­bil­i­ty, and if some­thing in that world doesn’t have the best of those char­ac­ter­is­tics, you won’t use it. It’s why Zoom has been so suc­cess­ful because it’s so easy to use.”

In a sim­i­lar way, Forte argues, cloud-host­ed tech is forc­ing organ­i­sa­tions to rethink their approach to tech­nol­o­gy. “Cloud is help­ing us to focus on those real­ly impor­tant themes and that becomes an impor­tant part of what we need to make our busi­ness suc­cess­ful,” he says.

A new approach to budgeting

A fur­ther big shift for organ­i­sa­tions is how cloud changes the way IT is paid for. It involves a fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion from on-premise projects fund­ed by cap­i­tal expen­di­ture, which require annu­al bud­get­ing and big-tick­et sign-off from finan­cial deci­sion-mak­ers, to ongo­ing pro­grammes that can quick­ly be turned on or off and scaled at pace, and are paid for from oper­at­ing expens­es. 

This, again, requires dif­fer­ent skillsets and a new approach to bud­get­ing and finance, says Alford. One of the main issues, he says, is due to the flex­i­bil­i­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty of cloud ser­vices, it’s now easy for almost any­one in an organ­i­sa­tion to switch on pay-as-you-go cloud ser­vices, lead­ing to the risk of IT costs spi­ralling out of con­trol. “The last thing we want­ed was every­body using the BP cred­it card to spin up more disks any time they want­ed,” says Alford. 

To avoid that, BP had to learn fast. Alford estab­lished a “cloud ser­vice line”, which took respon­si­bil­i­ty for orches­trat­ing demand and match­ing it to the ser­vice received from the cloud provider. “It could kill instances that were run­ning, but peo­ple weren’t using,” he says.

“We even put apps on the devel­op­ers’ phones that allowed them to eas­i­ly snooze their envi­ron­ments at lunchtime and at 5 o’clock at night.” The result was BP didn’t have to pay for any of the hours when its cloud ser­vices were unused.

Adapting traditional tech skills

Although cloud puts a big­ger than ever focus on busi­ness out­comes, CIOs like Alford and Gill also warn that organ­i­sa­tions should not lose sight of the impor­tance of devel­op­ing in-house tech­ni­cal skills, rather than sim­ply expect­ing those aspects to be trans­ferred ful­ly to the cloud ven­dors.

“If you want to work and oper­ate in the cloud, you still need to have a core inter­nal capa­bil­i­ty,” says Alford. “Hav­ing your own engi­neers, albeit that you don’t need hun­dreds of them, will save your bacon a lot of the time, and you’ll save your­self a lot of mon­ey as these peo­ple gen­er­ate val­ue in terms of safe­ty, reli­able oper­a­tions and secu­ri­ty.”

How­ev­er, many of those capa­bil­i­ties are unlike­ly to exist with­in the organ­i­sa­tion in the first place, he adds. For BP, it was a case of tak­ing their in-house on-premise team and reskilling them to have the right tech­no­log­i­cal under­stand­ing to get the best out of its two cloud providers, Ama­zon and Microsoft.

Mean­while, find­ing CIOs and oth­er dig­i­tal lead­ers with skillsets that span both tech­nol­o­gy and the “soft­er” busi­ness skills demand­ed by cloud, is chal­leng­ing, says Graeme McNaull, asso­ciate direc­tor of IT recruit­ment firm Har­vey Nash. “More than ever, CIOs need to be able under­stand the tech jar­gon and relate that back to the busi­ness lead­ers who are not tech­ni­cal­ly mind­ed,” he says. “But we’re fre­quent­ly get­ting feed­back from our clients that some­one wasn’t able to artic­u­late exact­ly what they were try­ing to do.”

How­ev­er, he points out, it’s impos­si­ble to have long-stand­ing cloud skills. “You can’t find some­one with 15 years’ cloud expe­ri­ence, as it’s still very, very new,” he says. “But there’s a need for IT lead­ers with a vision of how every­thing fits togeth­er; these days, they need to under­stand the busi­ness as much as the CEO.”