Scott Lowe at the SoCal VMUG event

As some of you know, I have recently decided to take a leadership role with the Orange County VMUG.  I have had a chance to meet some extremely nice and smart people through the process and we most recently held a Southern California (SoCal) VMUG Conference in Anaheim.  One of the highlights, for me, was hearing Scott Lowe (http://blog.scottlowe.org/)present the Keynote.

The title of the keynote was “Closing the Cloud Skills Gap.”  It wasn’t the typical tech talk where he spoke about “what to get excited about in the new vRealize suite; it was more of how to adapt to the ever-changing world of tech (in VMWare specifically).  I took lots of notes and had many things I wanted to highlight, but then I ran into an article written by Ken Umemoto (http://kenumemoto.blogspot.com).

• 50% of business w/ cloud as high priority
• Insufficient candidates to fill openings
• Cloud brings new set of skills unneeded in past (Curtis Robinson, IDC)

Scott Lowe asked the audience what they thought are some skills needed to adapt with the “Cloud” agenda that 50% of businesses say is a high priority.  Some examples yelled out were: puppet, python, bash, powershell, etc.  Then he told us that the IDC asked IT hiring mangers what they considered the top 5 job skills were.  It surprised most of us.

1. Risk management
2. IT service management
3. Project/program management
4. Business-IT alignment
5. Technical skills in cloud implementation

The technical piece came in 5th.  The others were more business needs, not really technical ones.

He then went into how you still do need the technical edge to build these cloud environments and some of the key skills you need are (from my notes, so there are probably more):

1. Understanding development – not necessarily becoming a programmer, but the need to understand the process
2. Linux – This is found in datacenters more and more and it is not going away.  Storage, VMWare, etc. all use this as the kernel.
3. Scripting – I know I said programming was not necessary, but scripting is.  learn PowerShell, Python, Ruby, etc.  This will help you automate tasks and enable your cloud to be replicated with consistency and speed.
4. Public Cloud – Take advantage of existing cloud archetectures and learn about how to enable DR and other IAAS via vCloud Air, Azure, etc.
5. Learn other useful technologies such as Docker, Hadoop, Puppet, etc.

I think the topic I really reflected on was when he talked about IT Alignment.  The points he brought up were topics I really believe in and think we (as a geek, IT, techie culture) need to take to heart.

1. Talk to the business and see what the business needs are.  What are the challenges they are facing and how can IT address those challenges?
2. Don’t use IT jargon.  They don’t understand it and they don’t really care to (see point number one).
3. Don’t say “No.”  He told a short story as an example of how a user can ask us for something and we have an internal thought process going on (that they wee not privy to), then we just say “No.”  From their perspective, they asked us a question and we just shut them down.  We need to open up that internal thought process (ie. in order to allow you to pull files from the servers from your iPhone, we will need to set up a new firewall and put a reverse proxy server in the DMZ and purchase x number of servers and y number of certificates, etc – this was not Scott’s example btw) to the users.  It will then be up to them if they want to go through the process of getting that project approved from the business side.  We just have to give them the ability to make those business decisions.  This will lead to the next point…
4. Shadow IT – I never heard this phrase before, but it makes sense.  Take the example above where the user asks us to allow them access to files in the network to their iPhone.  When we just say “No,” the need does not go away.  They will just find another way (outside of IT) of accomplishing it (ie. dropbox, etc).

Like Ken U, I also wrote down some quotes (actually, the same ones he had), so I thought i’d just point them out:

“If you don’t like change, you will like irrelevance less”
“Security puts the “NO” in “Innovation” – This applies to #3 of the IT Alignment topic
“One throat to choke”

Scott definitely gave me some things to consider and mull over.  Thank you Scott and thank you to all the people responsible for putting on the SoCal VMUG event.  I think it was a big success and look forward to working with you all again!