Cloud, crowd and outsourcing will eat your lunch

Presentation from Cornell University, Enterprise cloud strategists.

Disruptive changes are happening in IT sourcing.

Cloud computing is the obvious one. We can't compete with it. Commoditisation, scale etc. No brainer. Everyone should be doing it for commodity services.

Crowdsourcing will reshape IT staffing. Gartner have predicted that in 15 years the predominant employment relationship for IT staff will be freelance/contract based. Will have to reach outside of our community for some skill sets.
Cornell have done a crowdsourcing pilot with TopCoder. They have a global, talent pool approaching 1m. It's competition based, and Cornell only pay for the best solution. Projects broken down into very small projects which encourages hyper specialisation. The individual solutions then Integrated by specialist integrators.

Outsourcing is rising. Big companies like Accencture, Capgemini offer packages for outsourcing whole services

Disruptive innovation is accelerating. Time between disruptive innovations is decreasing. Foundations are being shaken everywhere. Digital experiences are replacing people experiences. Uber vs yellow cabs. Airbnb vs hotels. Travelocity vs travel agents.

Cloud vendors have the ability to disrupt us, can go to end users and bypass IT departments. They sell above IT directly to business units, and below IT directly to end users. We are no longer necessarily the providers of services.
We want to wrap our services around cloud, but consumers want to just buy products.

Enterprise IT roles are changing.
Oliver Marks from ZDNet quote. "Cloud companies are cost effectively emancipating enterprises from the tyranny of IT, solving lots of problems with tools that are a pleasure to use."

So, campus goes shopping, but the problems will still be ours! We need to change our relationship with our customers. Bridge the gulf between what our current structure/staffing was built to do and what is required of us in the era of post enterprise IT

We need to be a business asset by becoming the following:
Expert advisor for disruptive change
Navigator of procedural barriers
Innovation hunter
Time to market experts
Bridger of gaps (integration, architecture, security etc)
Value added reseller of cloud services, ie wrap our support etc round cloud services
Be or support an IT VMO (Vendor Management Office)
Refocus ourselves on supporting the core mission of teaching and learning and research. Running IT is not the core mission of the University.

Enterprise IT must become the strategic advisors to our customers and our vendors.

Don't be a mere operational function, a follower in a era of disruption and commoditisation
Be a change leader, a business asset, aligned with the core mission.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad