IT’s Changing Role

Creating a Cloud-First culture changes the role of the IT professional and function in government. So get ready.

For the IT professional or for that matter the IT function itself, the wide-scale adoption of Cloud-based technologies dictates change.

How much change? To find out how, On The FrontLines interviewed leading private sector technologists who shared what they are seeing.

Brian Burba Vice President, Business Development, Cloud Customer Solutions Unit from CA Technologies told On The FrontLines he is seeing the job of actually delivering IT services moving from a standard manufacturing model to much more of a supply chain management model.

“The job of IT is going to be assembling services from all these places—from external and internal built stuff, internal clouds and external services. The job becomes a supply chain manager,” explained Burba.

“Think of companies such as Boeing; they receive components at the factory; they are not building the plane, they are assembling the plane at the last mile. We think that IT will be more in that vein. Design, assembly, supply chain management is geared for the business constituents; where all the stuff comes from is less important.”

That flexibility is what breaks down barriers for CIOs and specifically provides a way to get started with a private Cloud.

His colleague at CA Technologies, Bill Clark, VP, Technical Sales & Public Sector CTO, agrees.

“The concepts are not new. What is new is the ability to put a front-end in front of someone who is going to consume the service. This allows them to choose what services they want at what cost; and be able to provision and de-provision (the elasticity part) that service as needed. That is what NIST says makes for true Cloud computing.”

According to Clark customers are just getting into the concept of having a “service catalog front-end” and the back-end could be where your typical operations get provisioned.

New Business Paradigm

Stephen Wallo, Principal Systems Architect, at Brocade said that what is being created is almost a new business paradigm.

“Systems administrators take care of servers and applications; network administrators take care of the network. It is a nice delineation,” said Wallo.

“Now as things converge the lines start to blur. Now the network folks have to talk with the server folks. That is good, because when you have two different groups and the lines are blurred, the culture has to change.”

Riverbed General Manager & Senior Director, Federal Markets Division, Bill Hartwell added that roles are changing because distributed IT evolved into everyone having their own “island of IT”. While there was a lot of overarching architecture and oversight by CIOs and CTOs, they began to lose budget responsibility because these different stovepipes bought for themselves.

“If you want to do virtualization or private automated Clouds, then you will see a shift back to centralization,” said Hartwell.

“If you don’t, there is no cost advantage. We see shifts going on in some agencies and departments that are Cloud leaders. This is evidence that stovepipe groups are now going to have to work under a common architecture driven at a departmental level and more enterprise friendly and sensitive.”

CA’s Clark summed it up this way.

“The IT pro is going to have to manage a supply chain. They have to be business oriented, understand the technology and have tools that let them see the costs internal versus external. Then they can make decisions for the enterprise on what is the most cost effective way to deliver a service—internal, external or hybrid Cloud.”

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