CW+ Premium Content/Computer Weekly

CIOs may need to lose staff who are not prepared to move to new ways of working brought on by cloud computing. Cloud reduces the need for on-premises datacentre facilities, thereby reducing the need for admin staff to manage such facilities. But beyond the datacentre administrators, whose jobs may be on the line as more applications are moved to the cloud, IT directors may find some staff are stuck in a traditional approach to IT, which puts them at odds with the latest thinking on the role of IT in business. In the past, IT may have been considered a business service that could measure its success through service level agreements (SLAs). But, as consultant Barclay Rae pointed out in a recent Computer Weekly article, SLAs are rather like a watermelon, in that even though on the exterior – the SLA dashboard – all may seem well with green lights, on the inside – the real service levels – alerts show red. "It’s too easy to set up SLA metrics based around IT activities like telephone-support response, system availability and ...