Building on infrastructure

CIOs and organisations are on the lookout for infrastructure experts, according to Kevin Sealy at recruitment experts Korn/Ferry. Sealey and colleague Bob Concannon have been studying the trend and Sealy and I discussed it recently.

Their argument (see here) that there is a new appetite for infrastructure adds up as although budgets are not exactly over-flowing, organisations are aware that they need to exploit the changing technology landscape that consumer devices and cloud computing offer customers and workers alike.

But for organisations to exploit, but not fall into traps, requires some top end thinking and involvement by the CIO and their teams. AsAlbert Hitchcock, group CIO at Vodafone recently told this title:

“We have a strong need to protect customer data. I see over time a virtualised image of enterprise applications on consumer devices…but that is at least 18 to 24 months away and it will depend on the cloud environment in your organisation.”

Sealy concurs in his note, adding that virtualisation has only recently matured and that cloud is growing into an alternative to outsourcing.

CIOs in a wide variety of organisations are deploying private cloud to increase the agility of their organisations, whether they are government or energy providers. This will and is challenging outsourcing.

Sealy and Concannon state in their note that infrastructure leaders will need to have strong business skills as well as technology, which is of course the same course the CIO career has followed in the last eight years.

So if infrastructure is rising up the agenda, poses two questions to CIOs. Firstly if you have a good infrastructure team you are going to need to retain them and there’s some business challenges around that at present. Secondly, if you don’t have the right team, you’ll need to develop or recruit the required skills.