Obviously, the biggest impact of any cloud migration will be felt in the IT department, which at most institutions is currently built around such tasks as server administration, database administration, and desktop support.
“The skill sets we need today and tomorrow are different from the ones that we have in great abundance on campus today,” said Dodds. “It’s not that we don’t need these skills anymore, but we need a different sort of category. We probably need a smaller number of more senior, deeper technical resources than in the past, and some roles and responsibilities will probably phase out.”
Talk like this inevitably sparks anxiety among IT staffers about job security. “You have to really help people see where the department is heading, otherwise they just see their jobs going away,” said Sue Workman, CIO and vice president of information technology services at Case Western Reserve University, which recently transitioned its PeopleSoft ERP to the AT&T cloud platform. To facilitate the university’s transition to cloud-based services, Case Western is developing training plans to help staffers shift to new positions, as well as a strategic plan that shows what new positions will become available. “Being as proactive as you can is really a good thing,” added Workman.
Cornell recently asked all 700 of its IT staff to do a self-assessment of their skills and then compared those with a list of the skills that the university thought would be needed in the next five years. “There were some significant gaps between the two,” recalled Dodds, adding that the university is now launching professional development and training programs “so that we can move as many of our staff as quickly as possible into this new environment without breaking our operational services that we have to maintain at the same time.”
While staffers can often be retrained to fill new roles, IT departments must also recognize that, in some cases, the new positions will simply not be a good fit for them. A cloud environment requires a new breed of service owners who are responsible for everything from conceiving the scope of a service to developing a P&L, writing a business plan, and then marketing the service. “You can’t take superb technical people—people who know how to keep a product tuned and functioning—and suddenly expect them to sprout those capabilities,” said Dodds. “It’s a different dimension: It is a horizontal dimension to what traditionally in IT has been a vertical specialization in technology.”
While restructuring any organization along radically new lines is difficult, the problem is compounded by the tremendous speed at which these changes are occurring. “Three years ago there would have been no more than a handful of IT organizations on campuses that had job descriptions with explicit cloud responsibilities built into them,” said Waggener. “That is just no longer viable.”
Indeed, there is a certain urgency among colleges now to ensure they have the right staff in place for this new cloud-centric world. “If you don’t have quality people who understand how to inter-operate in cloud environments or in a hybrid environment, that’s a problem,” said Waggener. “In the cloud, if you don’t do it right you can really run into difficulties.”
Changing the Mindset
Without doubt, some colleges are experiencing difficulty moving IT services to the cloud because their staffs are clinging to an old mindset of how things are done. “I see a lot of institutions mess that up,” said Lige Hensley, chief technology officer at Indiana’s Ivy Tech Community College, which is saving millions of dollars in the area of analytics alone by utilizing the cloud. “Their brains aren’t wrapped around how to use the cloud. They’re taking an on-premise approach and trying to apply it in the cloud. It doesn’t work that way and it’s going to cost a whole lot more. You have to shift your thinking.”
To assist in this shift, Ivy Tech brought someone from Amazon Web Services to Indiana to do a training session with 15 staff members. “We actually took a fair number of steps to get our folks to understand how best to utilize the cloud technology, because it’s not going to get you anywhere if you use it the way you use traditional technology,” said Hensley.
Changing campus IT mindsets is a problem encountered by vendors, too.
“At the same time institutions are facing changes in the model for higher education, IT is facing similar challenges. Clearly, IT plays a critical role in enabling institutions to leverage technology to enable business change. It will be interesting to see how IT organizations are able to make the necessary changes as they adopt to new business models,” said Connor Gray, Chief Strategy Office of Campus Management. “Campus Management has already helped many of our clients transition to the cloud by offering a robust set of options – from simple out-of-the-box solutions to more robust cloud solutions that allow for advanced integration with third-party applications. We have also added cloud training at our annual users conference – CampusInsight – to provide IT professionals with actionable insights regarding how to effectively leverage the cloud and to sharpen their skillsets.”
Mark Armstrong, Oracle’s vice president for higher education product development, noted that it can be difficult for college IT departments to give up the sense of control that comes from maintaining their own systems. He’s seen this firsthand as schools migrate their Oracle ERPs to the cloud. “A hands-on approach doesn’t work in a cloud environment,” he noted. “If an administrator requests a feature change, you cannot just go in and create a patch.”
(Next page: The need for standardization; focusing on mission)
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