What does the 2.0 enterprise do after it has moved its business systems to the cloud?
So you’re running systems etc for a small company – say, a startup with 50 people – your job is multiple hats, I’m sure. Operations, facilities, networks, laptops and oh: systems. You decide to avoid the pitfalls of old school IT: forget the corporate imaging of laptops. Instead, you buy blank laptops direct from a distributor or two (need to offer MacBook Air or you’re super unpopular). welcome to [cool company] here’s your laptop it’s still in the box.
You decided to put in a hosted VOIP or at least to outsource it, so you don’t spend your life fixing phone problems. Well played.
You realized there’s only one CRM solution on the market, so you got Salesforce up and running. Now it runs itself and people love it. Duh.
Then you needed financials. Tricky. You put in QuickBooks to tide you over, buy some time. Then you got a financial solution in the cloud: who wants to put a big clunker in the datacenter and hire DBAs, sysadmins and PL/SQL wonks just to keep the CFO from flipping his lid? FinancialForce, or NetSuite or Workday Financials or Intactt, or other. In the cloud. Now the people you hire for that solution are directly visible and delivering value to business: business analyst, project manager, reports and dashboards expert. You’re off to the races.
You also solved your multi-cloud problems: you put in Okta so your users can log in once and then be one-click-you’re-in to most of their popular business apps. Genius. Well, actually may make you look smart but it’s pretty simple. You realized the apps are useless until you can connect them together for common shared processes. Enter SnapLogic (there are others – this was my choice). Now you can quickly and easily build connectors between apps so new customers in salesforce get pushed to your order management app, and new employees in Newton get pushed to Payroll, plus dozens of other connections you hadn’t known were needed.
Oh, you needed a BI solution too? OK so you got GoodData to run a low price proof of concept for you, that was met with a resounding approval vote from your more data-hungry business users. Now you have a BI layer over your multi-cloud ecosystem. You’re looking like a winner. (By now, the engineers hate you because you did all this in the time they built one widget for your users to book conference rooms).
You also implemented – from day one – an agile / scrum approach to everything you do. No more large projects that take people and budgets of the map for many months, only to come in late and over budget. Every 30 days or 14 days you deliver a bunch of stuff to the business. No big bang Mondays – they’re history. Now you are moving into magician territory. People are wondering why you’re not sweating and popping heart pills like the other IT managers they knew in previous lives.
Now what?
The next thing is to tell the business that IT is going out of business, and is handing over the keys. It’s called Citizen Developer. The old school monopoly of large IT groups must be dissolved. You tell the business they can talk directly to your developers, and that they can drive prototypes, change their minds anytime, and have crazy ideas about how to solve the next business problems. It’s like Arab Spring, in the IT world. You don’t want to run a monopoly – you want them to share in the brilliance. It’s like your doctor telling you to run your own MRI and decide what to do – it’s craziness, right? Actually it’s the only way you’ll stay alive in the new world. Do it.
When you’ve shifted power lines to give business enough confidence and freedom to act autonomously, you’ll face some new and interesting challenges, while also receiving some novel recognition for your courage and confidence.
Firstly, the business really wants to manage its own destiny with systems and tools. You’ll find that the appetite is there, and the skills will come as they hire their own “smart people” to design and build stuff. Now, you have to draw new lines in the sand, like who will deploy to production, who will make a minor setup change in a workflow rule, who gets to be a sysadmin in production, who can bring in a developer resource from outside, who can install a layered app over Google Apps, or Salesforce, or Box.net? These are fun questions to resolve. Don’t be a control freak. The more you hand over, the more your company can move fast and remain competitive.
Next, you’ll see there are limits to all this do-it-yourself festival. Pitch in to help manage the company’s compliance and SOX / security initiatives. This gives you legit reasons to withold some critical responsibilities that simply must not be federated out to business silos: security policy, user accounts and ID management, technology selection, and integrations solutions, are a few obvious candidates. Manage these well, and let the other stuff go silo. You’ll be OK.
Hire super smart people. become the guru group. By staying ahead in awareness of emerging technologies, pure technical know-how, and by hiring the smartest people you can find, your group will naturally remain relevant and create a gravity effect where you know more and can solve more complex problems than any business unit and their more tactically focused systems groups. You’ll need to fight for budget to stay in the lead….
Attend lots of industry events. Send your smartest team members to lots of seminars and workshops. Develop technical skills like you pay into your 401K – this is very important. Do it. Even when you’re all screaming busy.
Last, you gotta be a politician. You must sell your team’s value to the business, constantly reminding your leaders and execs of the coherence of your strategy. Despite any semblance of randomness and “do it fast, do it now” agile scrum delivery, it remains true that you have had a vision from day one, and that this vision has been unfolding almost exactly to plan since you started. You’re not done, but you’re on plan.
Oh, by now hopefully your company isn’t 50 people anymore….
Appendix:
At my company we run 29 (and counting) SaaS apps, including these:
- Salesforce
- FinancialForce
- Box.net
- Okta
- GoodData
- SnapLogic
- Google Apps
- Coupa
- Operative
- DoubleClick (DFP)
- Yieldex
- Xactly Incent
- Rearden/Expensewire
- EASi Stock
- Anaplan
- Echosign
- Balsamiq
- Gliffy
- SmartSheet
- Webex
- Jigsaw
- Hoovers / D&B
- Time-off-Manager
- Newton
- Doodle
and more coming soon….
On-prem apps:
- home-built Hadoop cluster for very big data analytics
- Confluence
- Jira
