We survey the cloud’s effects on nine classes of IT jobs: Architects and sys admins win, middle managers and tech specialists lose — what about you?
Changed roles: CIO and senior IT managers Like lower-level IT supervisors, senior-level IT managers are having their responsibilities expanded and barriers among them broken down — or should be — to accommodate more flexible infrastructures that include applications or islands of computing power housed with external service providers.
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“A significant amount of the computing power and applications the typical enterprise uses is coming from Salesforce.com or Amazon.com or Google or other service providers,” Staten says. “If you’re going to rely on that connection and integrate it with the rest of your infrastructure, you need someone who can identify standard interfaces, enforce service levels, make informed decisions about which service providers to choose.”
In the past, the CIO or IT executive responsible for outsourcing deals was the only one involved with those kinds of extracurricular connections, Forrester’s Dines says. With cloud and SaaS, many of the senior IT managers will find themselves doing it.
Changed roles: Contract and service managers Dealing with service-level guarantees, searching for and choosing the best provider for a particular IT service — whether that be a SaaS company, external cloud provider, or internal IT — is too much for many IT people to handle given their hands-on workloads, says consultant Cramm. “Typically you’re talking about a couple of dozen SaaS providers and platform providers you have to be able to talk to and integrate technology with,” Egan says, “and managing those contracts becomes a skill set in itself.”
Cramm warns, “There are a lot of technical issues to integrate with an outside provider, because cloud sounds so fantastic, but as we found out with Amazon, if you don’t do your due diligence and don’t have the contracts laid out right, you’re not going to get what you need and you’ll spend the whole [term of the contract] wishing you did it differently.”
Managing external vendors and contracts is second nature to large populations of specialists within IT, mostly those at companies that have outsourced most or all of their IT, Olds says. People in such organizations will more easily adapt to the external management challenges that come with the cloud.
Changed roles: Enterprise developers It’s not that large companies will be using less software than they used to, it’s just that they won’t be writing or customizing nearly as much of it themselves, says Forrester’s Staten.
Companies can get either the bulk or a large chunk of the software they use from Salesforce.com or other SaaS providers, which means they don’t have to build the core functions of those applications themselves.
They do need to maintain the data and databases, as well as implement a certain amount of customization to make generic SaaS apps fit their workflow and data — but much less so than in the past, he says. “You’re not really customizing Salesforce to meet your needs,” Staten says. “You’re making some adjustments, using APIs and documentation and simple tools they supply. Mainly you’re adjusting your internal workflow to match what the SaaS providers you choose can supply. In some ways that’s actually better because you learn more about standardizing on efficient processes rather than customizing everything.”
