Change Management Strategies for Cloud Smart Enterprises
Change management has never been easy and will not get any easier as organizations embrace complex heterogeneous infrastructures that mix legacy and next-generation enterprise platforms.
Intelligent enterprises are developing strategies that enable organizations to transform data into action across all lines of business in order to drive process automation and innovation
IDC predicts that over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs by 2022.
Chuck Tsocanos, IBM
Change management has never been easy and will not get any easier as organizations embrace complex heterogeneous infrastructures that mix legacy and next-generation enterprise platforms. This was the central conclusion of a BizTechRerports interview with Chuck Tsocanos of IBM on change management strategies for cloud-smart enterprises.
IDC predicts that over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs by 2022.
We discussed the strategic, operational, financial, and technological issues that organizations have to address. Here is what he had to say:
It’s interesting to see a broad consensus emerge around one key premise. Change management has never been easy and will not get any easier as organizations embrace complex heterogeneous infrastructures that mix legacy and next-generation enterprise platforms.
Change management has been pretty sketchy for on-prem for a really long time. It has never been easy to get common agreement from the different executive disciplines (business units, IT, compliance, security/risk management, etc.) that must work together in the internal governance bodies responsible for vetting and validating change and release management.
While many executives hope that moving to the cloud and embracing DevOps will simplify the change management process, the fact is that most established enterprises are operating increasingly complex hybrid environments that require continued attention to conventional operations while developing skills and expertise to manage hyper-converged and multi-cloud infrastructures. This complexity has only served to elevate the importance of change management. It must be at the center of modernization. More, not less, attention must be paid to establishing an enterprise-wide approach to governing enterprise architectures to introduce new technologies and to manage the life cycle of technologies -- including hardware, software, networking, cloud services, and security resources -- through to retirement.
This raises interesting questions about how conventional change management structures -- such as IT Service Management (ITSM) -- can guide the effective and risk-adjusted introduction of new cloud-based resources into the enterprise. Organizations have been using ITSM structures for years, and are now trying to determine whether cloud platforms require a fundamentally different approach to managing change. As new and old infrastructures come together to coexist for the long haul, organizations will have to determine how to accelerate the process of developing competencies and skills to manage these two worlds effectively.
The good news is that ITSM was prescient in evangelizing services-oriented architectures (SOA) all those years ago. A key attribute of cloud services is that they are natively based on a SOA foundation. The idea of making services the core element of IT operations creates a solid integration point for managing legacy on-prem resources (that are faithful to ITSM) and cloud technologies. It opens a window into the critical process dependencies that must be identified and managed to prevent conflicts and disruptions while offering common methodologies for avoiding time delays, unnecessary complexity, security vulnerabilities, and other risks to IT operations.
The biggest challenge raised over the course of the conversation revolved around managing upgrades imposed on organizations by external service providers. Executives are really wrestling with how to manage the risk of untested changes that are introduced into the environment by cloud service providers. We don't necessarily have control over when or how this happens. That is not to say that the updates are a surprise. Cloud service providers often go to great lengths to provide a “heads up” of impending upgrades.
Even so, upgrades can interrupt internal plans and priorities. “It's important to look at agreements that are being put in place with cloud providers to get as much control as possible over what goes into the enterprise environment.” It is also critical for change management teams to have clear visibility into announced upgrade schedules of different cloud providers to identify any dependencies that may have to be addressed to avoid disruptions.
Toscano noted that there are undeniable benefits associated with technology modernization and cloud migration. They are critical to advancing the business transformation objectives of organizations across all industries. The key to success, however, will hinge on developing change management operations that can rapidly mature to absorb the new technologies and processes that will be integrated into today’s hybrid enterprise infrastructures. Emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), will play a critical role in understanding, managing, and automating many important aspects of the change management process. “Enterprises have to ask -- and address -- tough questions. How can velocity be maximized while minimizing the chances of defects? How can enough guardrails be put in place to enable developers to build what the business needs in a rapid but safe manner."
He added that a new generation of tooling has emerged that integrates DevOps management with embedded security and risk management to provide the control functions needed to elevate confidence and comfort with managing massive change in a rapid and highly iterative manner.
For more information on BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.