#43 The Role of the CIO in Cloud Adoption

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on 2021-03-18 00:00:00 +0000

with Darren W Pulsipher, Doug Bourgeois,

In part one of this interview, Darren Pulsipher, Chief Solution Architect, Intel, and Doug Bourgeois, Managing Director, GPS Cloud Strategy Leader, Deloitte, talk about the cloud migration and the role of the CIO.

Keywords

#itgovernance #cio #multicloud #zerotrust #cybersecurity

CIO Heritage

Doug got involved with the cloud early on while he was working for the federal government running a large shared services organization. He recognized cloud benefits to his service provider organizations, and also realized the value to his organization. First, it would save money at the infrastructure level, and second, it was an opportunity to build cloud while virtualizing to help with the server sprawl problem. For one particular service, the cost cut to the end user was 40 percent.

In shared services such as cloud, once you reach economies of scale, you can provide the services more economically than most organizations can do on their own.

The Shift to Cloud

A dozen years ago, organizations, for the most part, were private cloud centric. They were improving their data centers to incorporate a combination of consolidated multi tenant, and with some automation capabilities built in. The pendulum swung about three or four years after that over to the public cloud with the large hyper-scalers (AWS, Azure, Google).

About three years ago, organizations moved to an equilibrium in the hybrid cloud. People realized that a wide variety of systems in their portfolio lend themselves to different models, some private, some public, some hybrid. Overall, there is a more holistic approach today to match systems and clouds with specific purposes.

Putting the Information in CIO

It’s now more important than ever for CIOs to have a profound knowledge of what’s going on in their organizations, becoming closer to the mission and business goals to best meet its needs. Whereas before, a CIO might be just providing infrastructure, now they need to make educated architectural decisions based on what’s available. There are two reasons for this. The first is the proliferation of data, artificial intelligence, analytics, and machine learning into core business capabilities requires fundamental business understanding. The second is the evolution of cloud has reached a new phase, the digital age, where core systems of the organization must be modernized to improve the service capability for their end users.

This journey has started to move the CIO back to where they belong, in managing information rather than focusing so much on infrastructure. Many CIOs have been relegated to the infrastructure box, when they could be given the opportunity to do something truly transformative.

CIO Positioning for Success

So what does the journey from Chief Infrastructure Officer to Chief Information Officer look like?

One way is to position yourself to be in charge of something new that the organization is trying to do, maybe a new process or getting in a new market, or even a business unit that isn’t up yet. You have continuity and perspective as you have worked with all the different application owners, and so you are uniquely qualified to take the initiative forward. Another, more common way, is through a negative event, where it becomes obvious change is necessary. A disaster can be the catalyst for a CIO to lead the way to a real transformation.

Join us for part 2 of the interview ….

Podcast Transcript