Central IT departments and business units are in a constant tug of war when it comes to the control of cloud-based resources. Each side has its own view of the roles involved. Unless there is a meeting of the minds, the adoption and management of cloud resources is sure to stay on the back burner.
RightScale surveyed 930 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. Its 2015 State of the Cloud Report emphasizes this point most clearly: Central IT and business units in the enterprise have different views about the role that central IT should play.
“Part of this conflict in expectations is likely rooted in the business units’ desire for more agility and their concerns that central IT is too cautious in cloud adoption — especially public cloud adoption,” the report notes.
David Linthicum, columnist for InfoWorld, weighs in on the matter in his latest article:
IT would argue that cloud computing is computing and should be in its span of control. But business units would counter with two reasons:
- Its usage often goes to directly to their specific work processes.
- IT often resists, delays, or overly complicates the technology’s use, putting the business units at risk.
The good news is that IT has responded to the business units’ demands by more aggressively using cloud services and even reducing how long it takes to provision cloud resources for the business units.
The bad news: It’s still a fight over control at many organizations. Some IT groups still believe their power rests in saying no, and they remind business units of that when anything new is proposed or, worse, when business units act on their own. Likewise, some business units have reacted to that “Dr. No” attitude by undermining or bypassing IT wherever possible in a passive-aggressive form of shadow IT, and the use of cloud services is an easy way to do that.
Whether or not your company has descended into such bad-blood behavior, the status quo that leads to months and months of delays while IT allocates human and computing resources needs to end — quickly.
For more information regarding collaboration in cloud adoption, read the full InfoWorld article and RightScale report.
======
APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: Blue Mountain Data Systems is dedicated to Application Development and Systems Integration for Federal Civilian Agencies, Document Management Systems that help in the preparation, scanning, indexing, categorizing and quality control of millions of pages of paper documents to electronic format and the Automation of Workflow Processes. Call us at 703-502-3416.
======
