Don’t ride your hybrid — drive it!
You may be thinking, “what the heck does leadership have to do with hybrid cloud?” Look at it this way, we’re ditching our old IT and that includes how we operate; it’s not just about bringing in some new, fancy, container hybrid cloud technology. Our old IT ways of doing things won’t keep up with the rate and pace of change that we’re going through. You can’t implement hybrid cloud by only focusing on the technology. The fundamental shift in moving the underlying technology platform from traditional IT, to cloud, to hybrid cloud, also requires a fundamental shift in how you lead your organization on the journey.
Take a step back and look at what happened to larger organizations when they started to use cloud several years ago. If you’re anything like our organization, where the business pushes us to get more done faster, you have to contend with the complexity of old tools at the same time you’re contending with new cloud tools that seem to make it easier to get things done faster. However, after a few years in, you’re probably spending a lot of money with the cloud vendor, so you look at tools to help you reduce cloud spend. Then, you realize that maybe the ITIL and ITSM program you implemented in 1997 isn’t covering everything that you have in cloud. What are you left with? Cloud sprawl, dramatic complexity, and you’re not really sure what that means or how that will impact you.
Now, I’ve only touched on some of the implications when helping your business move faster while having the tools available to do this. But, instead of simplifying your solution, you’re left with more complexity. As my team progressed on our own journey, we realized that to help the business move faster with better security and improved scale, while making it simple, we had to start thinking about platforms that create value for our application teams. At the same time, we realized that we also needed to change the way we get things done, our practices, and the skills our team needed, our people.
Look at it this way, build the platform, change the practices, and re-skill the people. Oh, and do it all at once, as quickly and as safely as you can. If that’s not a wake-up call to break out your favorite “transformational leadership” book, I don’t know what is. Remember, our objective here is to have a successful hybrid cloud platform on which we can measure tangible business value. Let’s break some of it down to level-set on what we’re talking about.
Platforms
Build the platforms. This is how you take the available technology and implement high-value platforms for the business application teams to build on. You do this in ways that allow you to access current data that may be in your on-premises sites, with data and tools across the cloud. As a leader, the key here is making sure you give the team freedom to innovate as they implement and do it in new and better ways. The lesson: be mindful on which behaviors you’re reinforcing and rewarding. Reward the behaviors around experimentation, that it’s okay to fail when we learn from the failure, and build in modern, resilient ways. When you do this, the team will be inspired and move faster. If you reward the legacy behaviors of firefighting issues that happen due to poor investment, long waterfall plans to get things done, and praise the team for keeping decades old systems up and running, you’ll reinforce these behaviors and get more of them, which is exactly what you don’t want.
What did we do on our team? We spent a lot of time setting the context of what we were trying to do, why, and what good looked like. And then we got out of the team’s way to go build, innovate, and learn. Through this process, we identified ways to celebrate both lessons learned and successes, to reinforce that this is how we’re going to operate.
Practices
Change the practices. If your team is releasing multiple iterations of platform updates through software-defined infrastructure each day, the change management process you created five or even ten years ago isn’t going to do you much good. What about how you keep your CMDB updated, or how you manage your internal chargebacks for elastic services when the entire financial model is predicated on having a minimal amount of reserve capacity 75% of the time? Bottom line: if you’re thinking about this correctly, then how your teams operate will need to change. As a leader of an organization, you’ll need to think through what needs to change and when, and guide the team to not just think differently, but to operate differently as well.
In our organization, we looked at some core ways of getting work done, and then intentionally focused on ways to improve things. Automation is a big deal when you allow push-button access to deploy applications into production. One of the approaches we took was to force applications to go to non-production first, and do image security scanning prior to production deployment. All of this work was automated.
People
Re-skill the people. When we talk about these new ways of getting work done, new technology, and new approaches to using the technology, it includes anything from writing code for infrastructure, to container application development, to agile teams, to CI/CD. If you aren’t already doing it, and doing it well, the team will need to learn new things and they’ll need the ability to apply what they learned pretty quickly.
Our team developed new career paths with skill guides, learning paths, and other tools to help guide team members on developing their skills. This also provided them with approaches they could use in discussions with their managers to ensure they could set goals and apply the skills they were learning. Managers sat down with each of their team members to have specific career conversations and target which path was best for them.
Look at your platforms, practices, and people. Changes to all of these things can help you quickly ditch the IT of the past and move into a hybrid IT, where you can generate value and help drive the business of your company forward. These are fundamental leadership opportunities.
In the coming weeks, we’ll dive into specific areas of leadership and offer suggestions and observations based on what worked for us (and what didn’t) in our own journey.
Matt Lyteson is Vice President of CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM based in RTP, North Carolina. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
