Skills required for delivering XaaS

- The journey of IT over the years has been surprising in so many ways. Back in 1990, it would have been difficult to imagine today's world of smartphones, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing. Many technologists who have spent a few decades in IT have had a difficult time adjusting to the new realities of contemporary technology. I can respect that. Many of us were used to the complexity and candidly, the fun of procuring complex and expensive hardware and software, mounting it in a data center, configuring it, and then maintaining and supporting it. This work requires valued and deep technical skills, but over the past 15 years, many aspects of enterprise technology have been reduced to a series of services that conceal complexity and simply provide a solution on demand via an internet browser. This characteristic of everything as a service or X as a service requires different skills. Plenty of legacy technology work is still required. It's not going to go anywhere too fast. Enterprises have a huge volume of traditional systems that still need attention. Areas such as software engineering, business analysis, project management, data science, vendor management, and security will not only remain relevant, but will even grow in demand. It's prudent to recognize the broader trends and begin considering the skill needs for a future where X as a service and related technologies will dominate. The recommendations I put forward here for acquiring new skills can certainly be acquired by existing staff. Retooling is an option when the individual staff member is open and ready to embrace change. First and foremost, organizations require the right leadership to help develop and manage a vision for X as a service in their environment. This is a world where major downsizing and even elimination of the traditional on-premises data center is conceivable. A larger emphasis will be put on vendor relationship management, as X as a service creates much greater dependency on providers. Another leadership quality will be the ability to identify and deliver more innovation. This means not only the tools and skills to understand and evaluate trends, but the capacity to manage bolder and riskier investment bests. In X as a service, managers are required to understand the different IT finance approach between the traditional CapEx model of IT procurement and expenses and the Opex model of subscription on-demand based services. They will also need to pay attention and manage subscription compliance from ensuring the right access levels for staff to the movements of licenses between employees as people leave or change roles. This will also include the need to understand what solutions employees are using. In an X as a service world managing what people use and how enterprise data is stored and shared is vastly more complex. X as a service requires a mix of old and new skills. Technologists still needs to understand the fundamentals of systems, network architecture, data and database management, service management, system administration, and various levels of software coding. New hard skills will include talents in cloud system integration, cybersecurity in the cloud, and an area called low coding. Low coding is a software development approach that focuses on higher level languages, including function creation through graphical interfaces rather than lines of code. The road to embracing the value of everything as a service requires acknowledgement and action regarding the right talent to achieve business goals.