Don’t lose sight of your most important asset — staff — as you float into the clouds, warns Jyotl Lalchandani, Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC), in a column for the gulfnews.com.

While cloud computing is viewed as a revolutionary technology-based trend within the computer industry, it is also having major implications from a talent management perspective on the IT departments that are trying to implement it successfully.

This is regardless of whether applications are kept in-house or not. Outsourcing activities to cloud-based providers can cause a dramatic shift in both the number and the skill set composition of the IT department.

Given these realities, Mr Lalchandani stresses the need for businesses to fully comprehend the ramifications that cloud computing initiatives can have on IT organisational design and staff development. It is critical that they understand the transformations that are needed within the IT team in relation to the work performed, the skill sets required, and the increase in IT-user interactions.

Mr Lalchandani recommends that when considering a business’s existing technical infrastructure, the current organisational design and workforce skills are paramount to defining a coherent strategic plan, and the initial vision should be unencumbered by the organisation’s current situation.

So businesses should first look to define a long-term cloud computing vision without giving strong consideration to the current internal IT department. This may sound unrealistic from a technical perspective and cold from a humanistic perspective, but it will help provide a clearer picture when considering what’s best for the company in terms of its cloud computing strategy.

Mr Lalchandani also recommends dividing the cloud-based vision into two categories — technologies built internally and used within the firewall, and external cloud-based vendor services that need to be purchased. This distinction must be performed before assessing the staffing needs because of the dramatically different skill sets required when employing these two alternatives.

With this conceptual plan and cloud categorisation in place, the next step is to assess the ramifications of this plan on organisational design, the required human resources, and the necessary skill sets. The reason for waiting  to consider staffing and skills requirements is because each cloud-based decision has its own specific staffing implications.

With the cloud-based vision, strategic plan, and talent management plan in place, the next step is to begin executing the plan. At this point, it is critical that the plan is clearly articulated because the absence of an articulated vision can lead to conjecture among staff, which ultimately wastes time, increases uncertainty, and hurts morale.

The talent management issues created by cloud computing can be formidable. Indeed, Mr Lalchandani has seen the introduction of cloud computing result in displaced workers, internal IT reorganisations, technological ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, training challenges and resource shortages as staff are spread too thin trying to maintain existing production systems while they focus on building the next-generation computing platform.

Fortunately, however, as daunting as these challenges may at first appear, they are also perfectly manageable. However, for organisations to succeed in this regard, they must engage in proper forethought and planning and never, ever lose sight of their most important asset — their people.