Many IT workers must be wondering what happens to their jobs if their employer becomes an On-Demand Enterprise. If everything runs 'in the cloud', what is left for an organization's IT department to do.
The answer is: Plenty. You'll just be more efficient in the process. Like a gas filling whatever expanded volume it is given, expectations always rise when productivity increases. This is not surprising, as companies react to their competition and adopt industry best practices. When something becomes easier to do (deploy and maintain an application), the customer naturally expects more and wants to spend less.
Nonetheless, the IT department of an On-Demand Enterprise is structured differently from today's IT groups which are focused on deploying and operating on-premise applications. Most significantly: There is no corporate datacenter to maintain. Relieving an organization of the burden of acquiring, building, operating, securing and maintaining its own data center (and the servers, storage, and software therein) is the single largest benefit on On-Demand Enterprise enjoys.
No longer do companies whose business models look nothing like a technology company need to employ teams of computer technologists to run their businesses. Note that operations skills will continue to be in great demand in an On-Demand world. The difference is that their paychecks will come from the cloud computing service providers (Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, EBay, Facebook) instead of the companies that buy applications.
In the place of a data center operations group, an On-Demand Enterprise has two functions: SaaS administrators (one or more per application) and vendor management personnel to manage the relationships with the SaaS provider (and enforce the vendor's SLA).
The architects, developers, analysts and testers reading this may be wondering: What about me and my function? The answer is that these roles continue to be critical to an On-Demand IT department.
To understand why all these skills remain critical to an On-Demand Enterprise, consider that most organizations will receive their SaaS applications from multiple disparate vendors (one can hope that there is never a monopoly in the cloud computing space), and that most all organizations have specialized business processes that will require customizations.
Analysts will continue to capture requirements as they did for on-premise applications. Architects will be needed to develop standards and frameworks by which disparate cloud computing services are stitched together. Developers will develop the customizations so critical to making a SaaS app compatible with the organization's processes. Testers will be needed to ensure that everything integrates well together and meets the needs of the business as the customer defined it.
Of course medium and large size organizations will not become fully On-Demand enterprises overnight. Data Centers will be a fact of life in most enterprises for some time to come. But forward thinking organizations that start utilizing SaaS and PaaS to run parts of their business will benefit from an ever shrinking data center.
An On-Demand IT group is a familiar animal, only its more efficient and delivers more value to the customer.
