XaaS — Everything as a Service: People and Culture
One of the challenges of organizations in the XaaS context will be their ability to develop the talent needed to manage this new technological reality. Attracting, training constantly, maintaining motivation, relearning, are necessary competencies within an organization in which digital capabilities will be fundamental to develop and compete. At first glance, it may seem that using “as a Service” solutions would imply to decrease the layer of professionals in technology, that layer must remain in the organization instead, but possibly more focused on the identification and application of technology, and more competent than ever before.
Some traditional IT roles -without question — will move from the organization to the cloud providers and will be “commoditized” in a way, but those left in the organization, will be the most complex and enriched roles, those that enable a constant translation of business needs to the possible technological capabilities, those that can identify in the ever-changing offer from cloud providers, the tools that is necessary to incorporate to IT architecture to make the difference.
Obviously, this new environment will require an organization capable of attracting talent and not repelling it. Some features of a collaborative XaaS environment, focused on transformation should be:
• Allow freedom in time management.
• Find staff members who are excellent team players.
• Let the teams make decisions based on common sense, and not following defined policies (this of course means that the team is made up of very competent people). Teams completely oriented to methodologies, in which the process is privileged over the initiative, will fail in the new context, because the processes can never be updated fast enough to keep pace with changing business or technological conditions.
• Do not be afraid to fail, as the failure is a natural part of the innovation process.
• Be prepared to correct problems quickly, and be sure to learn in the process. Of course, we must have a proper risk assessment before we act, as there are failures that can put our clients’ information at risk or generate a severe financial impact.
• Constantly updating the team with the strategies and context of the organization and its business areas. I am sure we defend business cases in front of senior management; How much do we do for selling business cases to the IT team?
It will be necessary for the leaders to build a vision of how this team -that supports the digital organization- should be, what new skills, competencies and roles we will need to cover; this obviously includes the leaders themselves.
Then, inevitably, will be necessary to reconstitute the team, incorporating people with new competencies, training internal people with potential. But also letting go people whose competencies -perhaps suitable for another time and technology- are not the ones required now, and they do not show real capacity to renew themselves.
It will also be necessary to reinforce people’s soft skills. They must migrate from “push” members -to whom tasks should be specifically assigned, detailed explained and closely supervised-, to “pull” members, -who know what they must do based on their knowledge and that they have endorsed the objectives of the organization.
Teamwork must be a fundamental characteristic of a XaaS culture and to achieve it surely means to put aside many pre-established beliefs and practices, as the one that the hierarchy must be “the” facilitator of teamwork -and who resolves the natural discrepancies that are generated between the areas-.
An interesting Netflix document -a true “must read” for IT leaders- called “Netflix culture: Freedom and responsibility”, proposes a teamwork model called “highly aligned, loosely coupled”, where teams have great independence in their performance, but with real alignment to a common strategy, which reduces the need for constant coordination and generates a transparent behavior, away from tactical actions and suspicion on the other. This model reminds me the architecture and integration of micro-services, in which the technological components are built independently, but on definitions taken in common, and always thinking about the system as a whole.
Netflix defines five principles that guide its human resources management model:
• Recruit, reward and tolerate only fully-formed adults.
• Always tell the truth about the performance of the team members.
• Managers have the responsibility of creating great teams.
• Leaders have the responsibility to create the company’s culture.
• Good talent managers think first as entrepreneurs and innovators, and as human resource managers later.