By Kevin Lees
I recently updated the white paper I wrote a couple of years ago — “Organizing for the Cloud“ — which has been quite popular with our customers. The good news:
- It’s shorter – condensed to really focus in on the areas that our customers have told us are the greatest help
- The core concepts and models remain intact and have survived the test of time, and our customers continue to benefit from our best practice recommendations
From my perspective, there is no bad news; at least any I could come up with. IT leaders continue to validate with me that a new organizational approach as well as their people—and their roles and responsibilities—are more important than ever.
While I wrote that the core concepts and models have survived the test of time, that’s not to say this is just a condensed version. I’ve updated a few sections based on new technical capabilities enabled by the SDDC and my experience working directly with customers including:
- The organizational impacts of the software-defined data center (SDDC) as the cloud infrastructure – including a couple of new roles
- How to get started
- An expanded section on key cross-team collaboration
Just to name a few.
Organizational change continues to be top of mind as IT executives implement SDDC as the infrastructure of choice for cloud as well as double down on their use of cloud as the future of IT. No matter what the intended topic of conversation when discussing the operational implications of SDDC and cloud, 9 out of 10 conversations I have with customers quickly turn to organizational implications.
Organizational change is a critical step to success in the new era of cloud. I hope you find this revision as useful as our customers found the original.
=====
Kevin Lees is principal architect for VMware’s global Operations Transformation Practice and is based in Colorado.
