Cloud computing is not IT’s enemy

Once again, IT is going away or becoming less important or being relegated to nonstrategic support responsibilities or something. We’ve heard this tune for decades. It might really happen this time, though — a consequence not of the cloud or BYOD or any of the usual suspects, but of so many companies being seriously sick.

It’s probably true that CIOs have to take IT to the next level or have it fall to a lower one. What is the next level? To recap from last week’s Advice Line on the subject, next-gen IT collaborates, widely and deeply, with everyone else in the enterprise. That, in turn, can’t happen without a company that (1) does something that matters, (2) has executives, managers, and employees who are committed to making it happen, and (3) has enough mutual trust throughout that whoever needs to collaborate right now can do so without any concerns about the political consequences.

[ Find out the 10 business skills every IT pro must master and beware the 9 warning signs of bad IT architecture. | Get expert advice about planning and implementing your BYOD strategy with InfoWorld’s 29-page “Mobile and BYOD Deep Dive” PDF special report. | For more of Bob Lewis’ continuing IT management wisdom, check out his Advice Line newsletter. ]

It requires, that is, a healthy company.

Is IT being demoted? Take a recent commentary by Larry Tieman, who — unlike many of those predicting such things — has actual IT credentials and should be taken seriously. He sees such trends as cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS (software as a service) with their highly touted financial advantages leading CEOs to ask why they need a CIO.

He’s right that CEOs will ask this question. Not that he’s endorsing this logic — Tieman is, I think, predicting, not recommending, and in this he’s probably on target. CEOs will ask, and too many CIOs won’t be prepared with a clear, compelling reply. That’s a shame because it isn’t a hard question to answer.

The cloud won’t devalue IT — at healthy companies

A lot of the discussion about the cloud and how it will make IT go away is about IT infrastructure economics. The fact is, they don’t matter a bit. If every bit of IT infrastructure moved to cloud-based IaaS or PaaS environments, the significance for the strategic future of IT in business would be approximately nil, plus or minus 2 percent or so. Nonetheless, many electrons and tiny magnetic domains have been squandered in discussions about this by people who should know better (I’ll squander some myself next week in an attempt to end the nonsense, as if there was any chance of that happening).

No, to understand why healthy companies are unlikely to evaporate, demote, or otherwise diminish IT’s strategic role, look first at what IT does that matters most — something that’s become so commonplace most businesses take it for granted.

What IT does that matters

IT’s strategic value lies in the applications and information repositories it manages, not in the platforms they run on and are stored in. If the cloud is going to demote IT, SaaS is what will do it.

As Tieman points out in the article referenced above, the head of sales can bypass IT, contact Salesforce, and have CRM up and running the next day. With the head of sales as a role model, every other executive will, of course, take similar steps.

CIOs can and should explain this will work out just fine — if the company wants to return to the 1970s. But if the company values integration — a task only IT will do because only IT is in a position to do it — business-silo-driven SaaS implementations are a giant step in exactly the wrong direction.

Silos: A telltale symptom of sick businesses

Sick businesses don’t care about integration because no one making a decision about the systems used by their silo is affected by the need and has the authority to do something about it.

What this means: The head of sales won’t care when putting in Salesforce — and why would she? If orders recorded in Salesforce are output in reports other departments have to rekey, that isn’t the sales department’s problem.

The controller cares because his staff has to do a lot of the rekeying, but he lacks the authority to touch the Salesforce implementation and make it feed accounts receivable and the general ledger. Likewise, the head of fulfillment who would very much like to run an efficient warehouse.

It isn’t that integration is technologically impossible in the SaaS world. However, it’s organizationally impossible when all IT is shadow IT, with priorities set independently by the business executives who own individual pieces, carefully protected inside their own silos. This is what sick companies will do — dysfunctional ones if you prefer consultant-speak.

A peek at the siloed future of sick companies

A prediction: Companies that go down this rabbit hole will wake up one day and insist that their now-demoted IT department integrate the mess. The job will be very much like assembling a car out of parts ordered independently, by people who never talked to each other, from different catalogs — and in some cases, from different junkyards. And when IT’s best efforts look like something Rube Goldberg would have designed after taking bad acid, guess who will get the blame?

Because these are sick companies, and another symptom of a sick company is that when something goes wrong, the top priority is figuring out whose fault it is, making sure that whoever is on the receiving end has too little political capital to get a fair hearing. Fixing actual problems comes much later. Preventing them so they don’t happen in the first place? That takes a healthy company.

Which leads to this uncomfortable conclusion: The success of cloud computing depends on the assumption of executive dysfunction. How’s that for a business case for one of IT’s most important trends?

This story, “Cloud computing is not IT’s enemy,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.