Dear IT Leadership: Please Lead - February 25, 2009 at 12:03 pm

Follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.

Dear IT Leadership,

Today, your business needs you more than ever. The economy is weakening. Competition is intense.. You’ve helped it navigate technologies for years. But the business has immensely complex new challenges today. It needs your help to operate more efficiently. It needs your help to innovate in new ways.

In short – they need you to lead – but they need you to lead differently.

They need you to lead them through radical change.

What do I mean?

Have the wisdom to divide the marketing hype and the FUD from the real story behind cloud computing and utility computing. Despite their catchy names, Larry Ellison’s protestations, and the high-energy sales effort you’ll run into, these are real, they’re here to stay and they make a substantial difference. Your competitors know how to exploit them. Your business needs to, too. This is your responsibility.

Have the courage to rely less on the technologies that have served you well so far. Oracle. Microsoft. SAP. As painful as it is to admit, they aren’t keeping up. And they won’t do anything interesting in this department until enough of you, their soon-to-be-former-customers, leave them. There’s every likelihood they won’t do it then. And some of your old-line competitors will ignore my plea and do the same: nothing. This is your opportunity.

Have the strength to pull your team through the keyhole of this new paradigm. They’ll feel threatened because their old skills aren’t as useful as they once were. They’ll be scared for their jobs. But they’re closest to the problem and the ones who can best help you take the next step. Change is hard. Not everyone will make it. But you’ll need those who can make the switch for the very real, high value add work of transforming your company. This is your challenge.

Have the generosity to share what you know about technological success with the newest drivers of technical innovation in your company – business owners. Cloud computing and utility computing both reduce or eliminate barriers to technology driven innovation, but they don’t eliminate the need for things like validation and requirements gathering. They help technology become more egalitarian, but neither cloud computing nor utility computing know your business. Think disintermediation. Think empowerment. Think coaching. This is your reinvention.

Have the energy to jump in with both feet. Have the patience to put up with some bumps in the road. Clouds are built on solid technology and maturing quickly, but they’re still relatively young. A blip here or there doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Moreover, your efforts to transform the technical backbone of your enterprise will span multiple generations of cloud and utility computing, including future significant transformation that no one even thinks is possible yet. This ongoing radical change – this is your chosen profession.

Take the next step.

Build your next web application on the Salesforce.com Force.com platform. Start with a free developer account. Do it in secret and only show someone when it’s done.

Move a server to Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Start with the very next small project that someone wants to do but you’re worried is going to cost too much. Publish the price difference to the rest of the business.

Do a cost comparison between what you’ve spent on Exchange and what your email would cost to run on Google Apps. Now do that same comparison adding together your total email spend with your total Microsoft Office licensing cost. Google Apps can replace some of it. Launch a pilot.

Do it on your own or with help. Do it because your business demands it. Do it because you’re scared your competition is out innovating you. Do it because you’re tired of worrying about backups and whether or a not a server is running. Do it to grow the value your business delivers without growing headcount.

Whatever the reason, do it. Do it today.

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