What skills will IT need in a cloud world?

Gus Balbontin may not look like your enemy, but he is a symbol of what is effectively becoming your biggest problem – if, that is, you're an IT practitioner trained to manage internal systems.

There is likely to be a Gus in your organisation. Maybe several of them. And while it isn’t their intention, Gus might be about to make you obsolete.

Balbontin is director of transformation and publishing with Lonely Planet, the global travel colossus that ships over six million books every year from warehouses around the world.

He is excited about what has been made possible by the company's decision to abandon nearly eight years of investment in its monolithic SAP back-end system – in favour of an entirely cloud-hosted business environment delivered as-a-service by NetSuite.

“We are a global brand with a very ambitious agenda to grow even further, and quickly,” explains Balbontin. “Doing that in the current system is cumbersome, complex, takes time, and gives you a headache.”

“We knew that to chase our vision and strategy, we had to become far more nimble. The biggest part for us was not the SAP move, but the fact that we're moving to the cloud and simplifying our physical dependencies on servers and so on. It's hard for us.”

The training imperative

Across nearly every industry, scores of SaaS providers are harnessing enthusiasm for cloud services in the business community – and much of that enthusiasm is coming from non-IT staff.

Indeed, when Salesforce.com invites customers to their global events like this week’s Dreamforce Summit in San Francisco, it is usually line of business managers that are highest on the invite list, not IT directors. They are, in many respects, an easier sell - focused on features and business processes, less so on integration with existing systems, on network performance, IT security or contract risk.

This creates a challenge for internal IT staff - at times left out of business conversations or looked over for new projects. There is a strong possibility that the storage and server admins that held systems together for decades may require new skills to adapt to the cloud computing world.

Given its roots in such technical concepts as service oriented architecture (SOA) and server virtualisation, you could be forgiven for thinking that implementing a cloud transformation is largely a technology project, primarily requiring technology skills.

But that’s not how today’s recruiters see it.

“It's not good enough anymore just to have a certificate within a certain technology,” says Ravi Rao, director of recruitment firm Hunter Professional.

“Organisations that adopt cloud solutions find a reduced need for technical hardware and software skills,” agreed Tim Davis, director of ICT with recruitment firm Hudson, who has seen a dramatic shift in the types of people organisations are requesting as they move to embrace the cloud.

“The hardware market - and the demand for people that support it - is declining rapidly,” Davis explains. “This is probably even more dramatic in Australia than elsewhere.”

As cloud offerings mature, adoption is being driven at the executive level – where cost pressures are forcing a reconsideration of the old ways – rather than at the IT level, where limited staff are often run off their feet just keeping the existing technology working.

The technology skills required for an internal IT shop to develop solutions at cloud speed haven’t often had the chance to develop.

“Clients want multi-skilled people, because everything is now integrated,” Rao said. “But there's a bit of pessimism among companies wanting to do cloud, because it's new and not many people have the skills. They're trying to do cloud on a budget, but a lot of this stuff requires the company to develop their staff.”

It's not for lack of trying, or intent: Hudson's latest hiring-intention figures suggest the ICT industry leads all others in its intention to employ permanent staff (up 3.3 percent quarter-on-quarter, to 35 percent) and contractors (24.1 percent).

A large part of that demand, recruiters suggest, comes from companies eager to tap into the cloud but unable to find adequate internal skills to make it happen.

Read on as we discuss new training options for the cloud world....

Soft skills

Analysts argue that skills like contract and relationship management, business needs assessments and negotiation have surpassed hard technical skills when it comes to managing the IT organisation's interactions with cloud providers.

“The IT organisation moves from being primarily a provider – which is very much an engineering kind of discipline – to being a broker,” Gartner research director Michael Warrilow explains. “This is more of a facilitator and a business role – but you obviously can't make that transition overnight.”

Brian Hudson, director of information systems at the Department of Agriculture and Food WA (DAFWA) sees a long road of skills development ahead as his agency mulls cloud adoption.

“When we embark on the procurement of cloud services, we [will] need to be experienced in that area,” he said. “Even if the services are provided by external vendors, we need to understand the challenges around SLAs.”

Reskilling

Training organisations are starting to respond.  

Dimension Data Learning Solutions (DDLS), for example, has introduced cloud-related training courses – and spruced up training for related disciplines such as ITIL for service-level management, and PRINCE2 for project management.

“The IT decision is moving outside of the IT department,” says DDLS CEO Mal Shaw. “Things like ITIL give you a guidance framework for cloud service provider arrangements, and can give you a common language to manage the various incidents and problems between partners in those relationships.”

“Cloud brings change to the way that organisations implement IT, so organisations are looking for methodologies and accreditations to make sure they've got a best practice approach."

Beyond new vendor certifications - (Cisco Systems, for example, now offers partner certifications such as the Master Cloud Builder Specialisation and Cloud and Managed Services Program) - the skills gap has been recognised by universities.

The University of South Australia has introduced a full university qualification around cloud computing – the Bachelor of Information Technology (Cloud Computing)

Indicative of the changing nature of cloud skills, that program combines conventional IT topics with accounting, management, problem-solving, information security and other topics.

But the three-year lag time for completion means such courses won't markedly impact availability of cloud skills in the short term.

See part II of this story - 'Nine paths to a cloud career'.