Enterprise technologists need to consider standardisation, orchestration and automation as these extend to business processes

Moving to the cloud means not only focusing on orchestration and standardization at the technical level but change at the business process level, too, explained Tomas Kadlec, who until recently served as group infrastructure IT director at Tesco.

Kadlec, who was speaking at the Telco Cloud Forum in London this week said technologists within enterprises too often narrow their focus on the technologies needed to solve a problem or supply a need.

“In cloud everyone’s always talking about automation and orchestration, and as a technologist and an enthusiast within IT you always focus on the IT element,” he said. “So you go down and automate it, deploy orchestration, and make it brilliant. But suddenly you realize this one step is just that, one step in a much larger process.”

Kadlec was most recently responsible for Tesco’s IT infrastructure strategy globally, and has spent the better part of the past few years building a private cloud deployment model the company could easily drop into regional datacentres to power the troubled European food retailer’s operations locally and beyond.

This was done largely to improve the services it provides to clients and colleagues within the company’s brick and mortar shops, and support a growing range of internal applications and digital services.

He explained that as cloud services become more prominent within organisations, technologists need to start addressing standardisation, automation and orchestration at the business process and organizational level – which is where many of the challenges really are. This will help sell these technologies to other areas of the business outside IT, and help accelerate positive change in these organisations.

“How do you actually bring people together? How do you make sure the Korean team isn’t thinking of moving to Windows 8 or something while the UK team doesn’t even have the capability? It’s about simplification of the landscape, speaking the same language,” he said.

“So as an IT pro there is an element of having to go back to the customers and bridging that gap between needs and capabilities. Standardization is not jus technical, it really about mindset and organizational change,” he added.