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The most successful businesses are built on the skills and expertise of their staff.

A programmer, planner, salesman or strategist; a good boss sees the holes in the services they offer and finds the right people to fill them. This approach goes a long way to fostering a positive organisational culture. Every individual feels valued, important and that they are contributing to the firm’s success.

At least, that’s the idea.

Instead a lot of the problems created in the workplace come from treading on colleagues toes. Egos can take a bruising if it’s felt a co-worker is dipping their toes into another’s area of expertise. Even worse is when this toe-dippage ends up creating more work, costs time and causes delays for other projects.

While the Cloud is being embraced by many small businesses for its cost-effective and streamlining potential, through services such as Hosted Exchange for email, it isn’t being welcomed wholeheartedly by IT workers.

If its implementation isn’t managed carefully, you can see why. Many advocate an adoption of the Cloud because it removes the need for an in-house IT team. How many individuals are going to champion a new technology that effectively makes them obsolete?

In a new survey there is another problem revealed, which suggests the Cloud is creating day to day issues for IT staff. The study by Host Analytics asked 350 CIOs and IT Managers about trends in Cloud Adoption.

Over a third, 37%, said they had been asked to take ownership of cloud solutions bought by the business with no IT input. 67% said they’re finding data integration a problem. 39% said they have problems in locating where data might reside.

While the majority of IT workers can see the impact the Cloud is having on business, and generally think it’s a good thing and that the issues are rooted in the short term it should lead business owners to ask a question; how much are they really thinking about Cloud implementation?

Similarly, for IT managers, how can they use their expertise and experience to make it a more positive solution for businesses?
The democratisation offered by the Cloud inevitably means more members of staff will suggest what are essentially IT solutions. Creating new applications and ways of working will inspire different departments to come up with, and often implement ideas. No boss wants to stifle their staff’s creativity, but there  needs to be ownership so that every new idea helps the company to grow and give a better service to their clients, rather than create headaches for co-workers. Communication becomes increasingly important.

For IT managers, they have to use their expertise and experience to drive this forward. A more strategic role is what could come from the re-jumbling and re-working of organisational structures brought by the Cloud. There is also the potential for outsourcing, or making money from the shift by becoming a re-seller, which helps IT experts to add a new string to their bow as well as potentially making some money.

The Cloud offers potential for business to grow, however it needs to work in harmony with organisational structure and culture for the benefits to be felt.

Tags: Cloud, collaboration, colleagues, communication, computing, Hosted Exchange, IT companies, Resellers, Saas

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2012 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Laura Brown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.