Silo Busting 44: Cloud Operating Models with Miha Kralj and Sandra Loughlin

*Cloudy with a strong chance of organizational change.* That’s the forecast for just about every business right now. The cloud brings both great promise and the potential for disruption. Sadly, few companies understand how to prepare their IT ecosystems for such a storm of transformation. Luckily for them, our guests on Silo Busting, Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, and Sandra Loughlin, our Chief Learning Scientist, are here to speak about what takes to master cloud operating models. Loughlin defines a cloud operating model as “a mental checklist of all of the things that need to be considered and addressed when making substantive changes to how your organization operates. So this is, very simply put: people, process, tools, and data.” Kralj, who tells Loughlin he prefers “real operating systems instead of buggy human operating systems that you are expert in,” says an operating model is “the way how you run IT. It's a definition of business of IT inside an enterprise.” Together they put the idea of the cloud operating model through its paces. They call about how cloud has brought IT back in-house… and about the complexity of factoring human employees into the equation. They talk about matching new skills to business needs and growing and training cloud-era IT talent. “How are we helping organizations to go from front-of-the-conveyor belt, blue-collar workers, to become actual knowledge workers in this new IT operator model?” asks Kralj. Loughlin responds by talking about automation, employees, skills and skill gaps, career paths, and more. This episode will instruct you about two-speed IT (“It might be easy to think in terms of that dichotomy, but in terms of an actual application and real-world practice, it's not a good thing at all,” says Loughlin) and the challenges of helping companies manage the transition from legacy to cloud systems. Stick around until the end you’ll hear our duo’s best practical tips for dealing with what Kralj calls the “never-ending continuous change cycle that is ahead of us.” Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon