From crowd to cloud: how IT teams can be transformative

The days of the IT team that sits in the base­ment advis­ing peo­ple to switch their PCs off and on again are long gone. Mod­ern IT func­tions are expect­ed to enable sup­ply chain busi­ness­es to pro­vide next-day deliv­ery ser­vices, intro­duce robots to ware­hous­es and even unlock the pow­er of big data. But to do this effec­tive­ly, they must be free of the lega­cy tech that serves only to reduce their impact across their organ­i­sa­tions. That’s the view of Mat Rule, founder and CEO of Toca, which pro­vides a low-code app devel­op­ment plat­form.

He stress­es that cloud-based sys­tems enable IT teams to keep their “ear to the ground, leav­ing them bet­ter placed to antic­i­pate busi­ness needs and be proac­tive in solv­ing prob­lems, rather than just react­ing to requests”. He con­tin­ues: “The func­tion must be at the heart of the busi­ness. It can­not be an island. If IT is not woven into the fab­ric of the organ­i­sa­tion, it can’t sup­port day-to-day oper­a­tions, let alone help the busi­ness to achieve its wider goals.”

Although the func­tion is key to suc­cess­ful busi­ness trans­for­ma­tions, there is a glob­al dearth of IT skills. A sur­vey of CIOs by Gart­ner last year, for instance, found that 64% con­sid­ered the tal­ent short­age the most sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­er to their adop­tion of the emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies avail­able to them, com­pared with only 4% in 2020.

This isn’t helped by the fact that firms are leav­ing their IT teams almost entire­ly respon­si­ble for data extrac­tion and tech use. Research pub­lished by Ricoh Europe this August reveals that only 11% of office work­ers have been grant­ed access to  work­flow automa­tion tools.

But adopt­ing cloud tech­nol­o­gy can help to solve such prob­lems by remov­ing the walls between the IT teams and staff on the ground, pro­vid­ing trans­paren­cy from the fac­to­ry floor to the board­room. So says Halit Deve­li­oglu, founder and CEO of Oplog, a provider of sup­ply chain soft­ware enabling SMEs to offer Ama­zon-like deliv­ery options.

“Swift adap­ta­tion has become a mat­ter of life and death for most com­pa­nies,” he says. “While on-premis­es sys­tems fail to adapt to new cir­cum­stances, cloud tech­nolo­gies can, in a mat­ter of clicks, get rid of all the scal­a­bil­i­ty prob­lems you’d nor­mal­ly spend weeks and hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds to  solve. It’s a sim­ple solu­tion to all the prob­lems that IT pro­fes­sion­als are fac­ing.”

Even organ­i­sa­tions that seem tru­ly com­mit­ted to on-premis­es IT solu­tions can switch to the cloud. Local author­i­ties have a rep­u­ta­tion for being wed­ded to their lega­cy tech, but one coun­cil recent­ly col­lat­ed more than 100 large data sets, empow­er­ing its non-data and strat­e­gy teams to coop­er­ate close­ly on a major sce­nario-plan­ning exer­cise.

The whole exer­cise was enabled by cloud tech­nol­o­gy. This helped the coun­cil mas­ter huge vol­umes of data and over­come chal­lenges includ­ing a lack of uni­ver­sal data lit­er­a­cy, accord­ing to Robert Har­wood, COO at Sling­shot Sim­u­la­tions, which helped to man­age the process.

“Sev­en out of every 10 dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives fail,” he says. “This typ­i­cal­ly has lit­tle to do with tech­nol­o­gy. The caus­es tend to stem from the process­es and the peo­ple involved.”

Paul Ander­son, cloud ser­vices busi­ness man­ag­er for Ricoh Europe in EMEA, agrees that there is a sig­nif­i­cant human ele­ment to any dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Win­ning hearts and minds through­out the organ­i­sa­tion is there­fore cru­cial.

“When employ­ees feel that they are involved in the deci­sion, you are more like­ly to suc­ceed,” stress­es Ander­son, who advis­es organ­i­sa­tions to demon­strate to all staff how the cloud can “auto­mate the mun­dane and labo­ri­ous tasks that IT staff have tra­di­tion­al­ly faced”.

Show­ing every­one the capa­bil­i­ties of the new tech is one of the keys to gain­ing cul­tur­al accep­tance and push­ing through a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Har­wood advis­es using cut­ting-edge cloud-native data sci­ence to trans­form data into digestible insights. Pro­vid­ing this func­tion­al­i­ty in a no-code envi­ron­ment means that even staff with few data-han­dling skills can use it and make their jobs eas­i­er in the process.

Build­ing trust across depart­ments is also key. IT teams in some organ­i­sa­tions have burnt their bridges with oth­er func­tions – or nev­er had them in the first place. Accord­ing to  Rule, it’s there­fore vital to give every­one the sense that they’re work­ing towards shared goals.

“The best way to get every­one onside is to get some quick wins under your belt,” he says. “For instance, an IT team at a retail­er might design an app that enables staff on the shop floor to know what is and isn’t in stock, which saves them from hav­ing to con­stant­ly traipse up and down­stairs to check. Or, at a util­i­ty com­pa­ny, IT could devel­op a por­tal that gives cus­tomers real-time updates on their accounts, sav­ing both them and the company’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives from con­stant phone calls and emails. Key to enabling this is giv­ing IT the abil­i­ty to devel­op and launch such apps quick­ly using low-code devel­op­ment plat­forms.”

Cel­e­brat­ing IT pro­fes­sion­als’ prob­lem-solv­ing skills at the cen­tre of the oper­a­tion is anoth­er vital part in ensur­ing that they remain hap­py  and engaged in their work, adds Deve­li­oglu.
“Keep in mind that, gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, IT staff have vir­tu­al­ly zero risk of unem­ploy­ment,” he says. “It’s there­fore impor­tant to keep them ful­filled with process­es that help them to realise the pos­i­tive impact they’re hav­ing.”