The Doppler Quarterly Fall 2018 | Page 76

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