By Kirk Drake | April 22, 2013

Credit Union Cloud Part 13: Staffing

How Will Moving to the Cloud Affect my Technology Staffing

Well, we are finally here.   The prior 12 posts in this series have covered a broad range of topics regarding Credit Unions moving to the cloud.  Last week we covered Credit Union Cloud Migration – and if you are still reading we are at our last topic in the Credit Union Cloud Series.   This week we take a look at how moving to the cloud will impact your staffing plans.

To begin – the answer is really – it depends.  The size of the Credit Union and the type of technology employees are the two biggest variables.   The other major decision factor is based on your Credit Unions philosophical approach to staffing.  Ongoing Operations for instance tries hard to have direct – client facing employees.  So we tend to outsource things that aren’t considered key to our Client Experience.   This tends to be true with a lot of our clients too – but sometimes clients really want to have certain job functions in house.

For Smaller Credit Unions

The good news is that Credit Unions that don’t have Technology Departments today – won’t need them when you move to the cloud.  Most likely you are already outsourcing a number of key technology functions and many of those should function better when you move to the cloud.  Why? Well, moving to a competent cloud provider will mean that many of the traditional technical challenges wont be there any more and a lot of the common problems should be eliminated. This is largely a result of picking key infrastructure components and management techniques that lead to better performance and uptime.

For Mid-Sized Credit Unions

In our experience – mid-sized Credit Unions tend to be the most challenged for technical resources. Often times that have two or three people in their technology department but the demands to provide technical services equivalent to large Credit Unions on significantly smaller budgets can really be tough.  For those reasons, we have seen this group adopt Cloud quicker than the other two groups.  Credit Union management are thrilled to finally remove bottle necks and free up key technology resources to work on business objectives instead of technical projects and infrastructure.   For this group, we see a quick transition away from IT Infrastructure and Networking skills into business technology skills such as data analytics, report analysis and creation, and mainly focusing on helping the Credit Unions technology achieve key goals.

For Large Credit Unions

This group will probably experience the biggest impact of cloud but will probably move the latest.  Why? Well, they tend to have the biggest budgets with the most “fluff” and they don’t have the same financial pressures as the smaller Credit Unions.  In addition, they can already afford many of the key performance and management technology that come with Cloud Computing.  Hence, the financial and performance gains are less impactful in this round.   That being said – we think it is just one more technology life cycle and the continued growth of cloud that will push this group.   For this group – the staffing implications are larger.  This group can actually see financial gains from the staffing changes but will most likely re-purpose and retrain key IT contributors to develop relevant project management, leadership, analytical skills.  For those employees who are pure infrastructure such as SAN managers or Network Engineers – we anticipate those functions will shrink or go away over time as key employees take other positions with more career potential.

So if you are thinking about moving to the cloud – stay tuned as we cover a lot of the high-level topics that will influence how you and your Credit Union evaluate your Credit Union Cloud options.  Do you have a colleague that you think would benefit from this series – if so please forward this to them!

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