From Crows to Peacocks – Reskilling IT in the Digital Enterprise

In a Digital Enterprise, everything is IT-driven, from the front desk to the edge of the organisation.  Every department of the enterprise is a critical user group that is highly dependent on IT.  So there is a whole category of IT users who are not from an IT background but are heavy users of IT.  Add to this the fact that IT is becoming all-pervasive, with access to IT services no longer from just desktops and laptops, but from a multitude of devices like tablets, smartphones and other devices from just about anywhere.  Further complexity comes in from a huge variety in desktop and mobile operating systems, browsers, databases, anti-virus, back-up, and the need for synchronisation across devices.  A veritable challenge to the olden ways. The ultimate challenge is the adoption of virtualisation and cloud into this already volatile mix.

Desktop virtualization, VDI and virtual application delivery are transforming the workplace IT environment rapidly.  Software-Defined Datacentres (SDDC) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) are disrupting the core of the enterprise in multiple ways.  The traditional and familiar architecture of routers, switches, servers, operating systems, databases, SAN/NAS, etc. is giving way to an amorphous and more fluidic architecture where everything is software mounted on virtual machines hosted in the cloud.

Practising IT Infrastructure managers are getting challenged and are reaching deeper and deeper into their skill repository.  However, most times they are coming up short. IT management engineers are grappling with architectures they don’t understand, and issues that cannot be resolved physically, when hosted in the cloud.

Recently in an interaction with a senior IT professional who works for a virtualisation product company, he asked me, “Do you provide crows or peacocks?”  In his parlance, Crows meant resources with IT skillsets of the old world, therefore an area which will lose value very fast and become as common as a crow.  Peacocks are the IT professionals who understand cloud, virtualisation, new-gen applications, and therefore the more likely needed resources for the new age.

The challenge for IT management resources and IT management companies is to recognise this change taking the industry by storm.  The need of the hour is to go back to the drawing board, assess the skill repository of the organisation and either re-skill the IT resources/add new skills or lose the strategic value (the common crow versus the highly prized peacock) that IT can bring to the business.

At InKnowTech we are furiously addressing the changes that are taking place, and developing capabilities to address the new challenges.  Our traditional systems administrators are retrained to become cloud administrators and virtualisation managers.

Our network engineers are challenged to jump from hard-wired networks to software-defined network architectures.  Our solution architects are in constant search for products and solutions which can help our Digital Enterprise customers to leapfrog into the new architectures of Public Cloud/Private Cloud/Hybrid Cloud.

InKnowTech aspires to be at the centre of these changes and manage technology, architecture and the way IT is consumed in the fast-evolving digital enterprise. How we embrace and harness new-age disruptions through enhanced people capabilities, process maturity and adoption of appropriate technologies will determine how well we can be aligned to the future needs of our customers.