I get e-mail, so much so that I have had to add a category for it. This one came in Tuesday:
I spoke with [client], who has spent a lot of money creating a private cloud for the company. They are struggling with adoption. They want to talk to other clients to see how they are ‘advertising’ the company cloud internally. How are they selling the value and benefit of ITaaS, IaaS, etc.?
And the response from another sales guy, on the way to asking me what to do:
…this is a conversation around IT transformation…it seems like they have transformed but the business doesn’t realize it. So it sounds like a PR issue within the IT division to get the message out.
What the client is experiencing is related to the need for IT to promote its services. This calls for new roles within IT and a new approach to driving IT as a service. Heck, driving IT as a service is a new approach.
Understanding that this is an entirely new challenge for IT (no bells/lights to tune, marketing to be done) is key to understanding the solution. Clients like this one are not actually delivering their services any differently: they have no user facing services catalog, no service descriptions, no differentiation between “legacy” and “Cloud” or even from one service to the next, assuming there are defined services at all. I would speculate there is no chargeback, metering or other service-based costing in place, so the users have no compelling reason to pick “Cloud” over “go rack me a server”.
Getting momentum around adoption for that Private Cloud you just built requires IT to start behaving like a service provider and make the case to the business. Give them a reason to join the party. That’s what acting like a provider of services ultimately demands.
Thanks to Rich Martin for some pithy statements I liberally stole for this post.