To succeed in the cloud game, you must attract and retain the best people in
your industry. In fact, investing in a strategic Talent Enablement program will
pay dividends now and well into the future.
Organizations’ adoption of cloud services models has opened up new opportu-
nities for business units to take advantage of the benefits cloud offers. With the
swipe of a credit card, business unit (BU) leaders can spin up a public cloud
environment and deliver industry-disruptive new applications in days.
On the whole, this is a positive development. BUs love the freedom, and IT lead-
ers welcome the chance to shift non-core services to the BUs, and focus their
own attention on more strategic projects.
But there is a trade-off. Application owners who create their own cloud envi-
ronments also have the responsibility to manage them – and many do not have
the skills to do it well. As a result, organizations are not leveraging the agility,
cost savings, productivity and overall return on investment (ROI) that they
envisioned from the cloud.
The solution is for organizations to get smarter – to find or develop the skills
they need to get the most out of the cloud. Finding employees with those skills,
of course, is difficult and expensive. Companies are struggling to attract and
retain top talent, particularly in positions requiring advanced knowledge of
cloud concepts. So, organizations are putting more of an emphasis on develop-
ing the needed skills organically, or leveraging outside cloud experts to provide
learning services.
Today’s IT teams, whether they are in central IT or in the BUs, first need to
undergo cloud training, to develop the skills necessary to perform their new
cloud roles. Second, given the monthly introduction of new services from the
three main cloud platform providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure
and Google Cloud Platform) and a
plethora of third-party cloud tool
providers, the learning needs to be
continuous to stay abreast of the
technologies. The third and most
important element of this three-
legged stool is the expertise neces-
sary to understand the technolo-
gies—to know which ones integrate
well with each other, and how to
effectively build and manage these
complex environments.
The solution is for
organizations to get
smarter – to find or
develop the skills they
need to get the most
out of the cloud.
74 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2018