Cloud & The AEC-CIO

Who knows what a company needs better than an operations person that's walked the walk? Working with proven, trusted, quality, service providers, and a lean technical staff, a construction project manager (or any domain specific project manager) can apply the same evaluation and partnering methodology to Cloud services that they do to the every day management of the relationships required in the buildings process.

Enabled by Cloud, operational managers (non-IT) with domain expertise and project management skills are in a great position to lead IT decision making.  They aren't concerned about whether solutions are from Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle.  They understand how to manage quality, cost, and schedule, and they know exactly what the pain points are that are inhibiting success in the core business.  Quite often they are engineers that can also jump right in on the technical evaluation.

This presents a strong argument for the diminishing value of an IT professional that does not (or is unwilling to) understand the domain discipline of the company they are working for.  This means understanding the business of the business, the processes, and the ability to evaluate the user experience and requirements with first hand knowledge.  It means understanding how the company makes their money, where they spend it (IE, what a small portion is IT), and how quality plays into supporting the humans that run the business that will contribute to the companies bottom line.

If IT leaders don't understand the core business of their company, there is little use in a middle man to interpret what were once complex on premise ideas.  The Cloud (public or private) done right, enables business leaders to go straight to a specialist, skip building the clock, and move on to reading what time it is.  Something the AEC Industry committed to many years ago when you consider how many self performing GC's no longer self perform.