What’s next for the IT Pro?
With the world of IT fundamentally changing due to the impact of Public Clouds such as Microsoft Azure, let’s look at why we need IT Pros to reinvent themselves.
Traditionally, IT Pro’s have, for a long time, been the Gatekeepers of Production. Their job was to ensure the mission critical systems remained available and performant. Change control was key to them achieving this while the development team held the responsibility for producing lines of code — with their value measured accordingly.
Enter DevOps
If you cannot see the fundamental issue with that status quo, then let us explore this further There is the agent of change (Developer) who is targeted on producing mass over quality vs the agent of minimal risk (IT Pro) who drives silos rather than collaboration and value.
DevOps is about breaking down these silos to create business value. This new state results in Dev’s worrying about time to value and IT Pro’s being responsible for the realisation of value.
What’s does Cloud mean for the IT Pro?
The IT Pro needs to step-up. A move to Cloud presents an opportunity to perform less management of servers, storage and networking, with the hyper scaler providers like Microsoft taking care of these non-value adding tasks. This drives new requirements where IT Pro’s need to become change enablers.
If we think of how IT Pro’s become change enablers then we also need to consider how they maintain their stability, availability and security posture. Ensuring infrastructure automation, deployment automation, configuration management, logging, monitoring, and many other areas allow for this.
Masters of Software
A lot of this comes down to software tools, that take away repetitive and non-value adding tasks that many do not like doing anyway!
Azure DevOps is a SaaS solution that assists with a number of the above tasks such as deployment automation. IT Pro’s should be a stakeholder in a Pipeline and ensuring Continuous Integration and Continuous Development and other components such as Continuous Security, Operations and Testing are achievable that in turn enable developers to realise time to value much faster.
IT Pro’s could test code against Enterprise security controls while also testing on a like for like production replica. Gone are the days of changes working in pre-production and failing miserably in production!
However, in the new world, IT Pro’s cannot just stop there. Continuous review of the tools in use is critical to ensuring that value is driven across the organisation.
What’s next?
If you like the sound of the job description for the new world IT Pro, then here are a few resources to help you get up to speed.
My thoughts are simple — don’t get left behind. Someone asked me recently why do we need to transform? I responded with “if we didn’t look to grow and develop as a society over the last 100 years then I would be riding a horse and cart to work!”.
