Impact on Roles

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From the course by The University of Melbourne

Moving to the Cloud

118 ratings

The University of Melbourne

Moving to the Cloud

118 ratings

The cloud is taking business by storm. In fact, due to the extraordinary growth of the cloud, it has been described as a tornado, not a fluffy white floating object! Commercial research analysts consider cloud as one of the most significant trends with a potential to change the whole global IT industry. Governments, including those in the US, Britain, and Australia, have cloud-first policies now in place which mandate cloud over non-cloud services in ICT procurement. But CIOs and other senior executives, while it's on the majority of their agendas, aren't sure what it really means for their organisations - how to leverage the benefits, control the commercials, manage the business risk, and adapt their organisations. While it is important to set requirements, negotiate commercials (terms, service level agreements, and pricing), and sign the contract - it is also critical that we develop a clear plan for ‘Moving to the Cloud’ which realigns our business architecture, organization and most importantly our people. This course provides the answers that management must know to be successful and realise the benefits: • Where should I go cloud? • What are the commercials? • Where is my leverage? • How do I realign my business practices and architecture? • How do I gear up my people and structure my organisation? View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hvtz2ph

From the lesson

Module 4: Getting Ready to Move

Welcome to the fourth week! This module is all about getting ready to move the cloud! There is more to moving to the cloud than signing the contract. We need to prepare our organization and muster our people. First, we will introduce: a model for managing the process of change and a capability maturity framework for assessing the “as-is” and “to-be” organizational states. Second, we shall explore the different areas of strategy, architecture, processes, structure, governance and relationships - organizational areas that need to be considered when taking advantage of the cloud. We will also have a couple of student presentations on the differences between cloud and traditional on premise, and generic principals for the adoption of cloud computing technology.

Organization6:32

Impact on Roles6:58

Meet the Instructors

Rod Dilnutt
Dr
Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne
Sara Cullen
Dr
Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne

In this module, we've been discussing getting ready to move.

The final thing we need to talk about is the impact that this is going to have on

roles in the organization.

Topics we're going to discuss are the impact on ICT roles in particular.

We're going to use a case study from an organization in heavy engineering.

We're going to look also at a new role example form a vendor liaison officer.

And importantly, we're going to look at the role of the change manager.

Moving to the Cloud impacts on an organizations reporting relationships,

on its portfolio of roles, and on its organizational structure.

In this session we'll discuss the impact on the job roles themselves.

We're going to use a heavy industry organization as our case study to

illustrate this.

The organization has approximately 2,500 staff, so

it's not big, but it's not small either.

It has a core capability in engineering, very much a maintenance mindset,

if a problem develops, then it will be rectified.

It has an ICT platform which has evolved ad hoc, its platform,

as essential infrastructure, had been largely neglected.

And it suffers from multiple platforms, multiple applications,

multiple versions of things.

And there is a proliferation of Excel and Access workarounds.

The driver of change for this organization was a cost containment crisis.

They appointed a CIO for the first time, and they identified Cloud opportunities,

with an indicative 50% cost reduction with maintaining an IT platform

this meant a reduction in ICT headcount.

There was a huge impact on its architecture, numerous applications

supporting the business were rationalized, 35 as is applications,

which there then rationalized down to five core applications,

which could run the whole organization from an operational sense.

As a consequence, there was a large impact on the roles.

There was a reduction in application support cost,

which was achieved through license savings and reduced headcount.

The application support costs were current at $7.5 million,

with an expectation, once rationalization had taken place,

there would be something like $2.8 million on an annual basis.

The impact on the headcount was that there were 29 people

in ICT supporting this application suite.

This was able to be rationalized down to 18 roles, and you can see from

this diagram, that there were new roles created and others needed to reduce.

A business analyst went from naught to four.

Previously, they didn't have a business analyst, but

they realized that they needed four.

They didn't have an architectural capability either, but

they realized they needed two to maintain the new platform.

The vendor liaison officer was there to support the software license agreements,

but there was a recognition that in a Cloud environment this needed to be given

much more thought.

There was a development capability of two which was needed to be increased to four

to accommodate the integration and the fixes that needed to be done on the fly.

And application support, a very large application support

crew of some 26 resources, which could be reduced to six.

Now let's just have a look at the role description.

We mentioned a vendor liaison officer, and we've talked about a vendor liaison

officer before when we were talking about new roles.

This is an instance where this was necessary.

The primary responsibilities of that role were to be the primary

contact between the client and vendor.

This is now the interface between the organization and the third party provider.

To monitor performance against service level agreements.

To manage work orders as new requirements arose and were specified.

To report and feedback on progresses being made against a contract.

And to manage problem and issue resolution.

And importantly this role reports to the Chief Information Officer.

The requisite skills and experience for

this Vendor Liaison Officer were commerce or equivalent degree,

experience with vendor management Well developed interpersonal and

written communication skills, these were critical.

Demonstrated planning skills, analytical and problem solving skills.

And the ability to interpret and apply contracts.

So a very marked change to current operations in that organization.

So leading back to the role of the Change Manager.

The Change Manager must be involved with the issues which might some of which

are difficult in terms of workforce redundancy.

We'll reducing our application support head count from 26 to 6.

There are elements of staff redeployment,

reskilling, and specification of the new roles.

This leads on to recruitment planning.

And, again, we need to emphasize the importance of human resource

management collaboration in this.

In the case study, the specification of new roles was required for

the new business analyst role.

For the new architect roles.

For the vendor liaison and

I'm just giving you an example of what some of those responsibilities are.

For the new developer roles.

Because these people are now more focused on developing in a cloud environment for

integration purposes and for application support. Again in a Cloud environment,

application support roles become very different.

A lot of these new and changed roles came at a high level of responsibility and

a higher pay scale.

These roles as they were created were benchmarked against the skills framework

for the information age.

To be able to provide consistency and standards,

just as we talked about in our governance discussions.

So in summary, when moving to the cloud,

some roles will be created, Some roles are no longer needed.

There will be an impact on the ICT function.

And the change manager must manage the specification of the new and

changed roles.

And then there is the importance of collaboration with human resource

management around issues concerning recruitment, redeployment, and

retrenchment to be able to support the new structure.

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