Cloud stimulating the Next Gen Business Savvy Developers

IT Service companies and the developers they employ have seen other disciplines cornering their traditional business. Marketing and Design agencies moving into the technical space with application development and data management sold under the Design Agency and Marketing discipline in recent years.

Challenges are not new, some of you will recall developers feeling threatened with the advent of Object Orientated programming and there will be future technologies that will continue to drive the industry and challenge the status quo.

The Cloud is just a technology moving the goalposts again. Developers and application development will need to respond to a new set of dynamics, these are high levels of quality and professionalism to ensure code is efficient as well as effective. The Cloud works on a different value exchange model to the old world, CPU time, transaction cycles and data storage volumes are all incremental cost centres that developers must now program against to ensure their code, transitions and data are optimised to deliver the lowest operational cost. There is big opportunity in creating a new awareness of value and setting price points accordingly.

Developers will become critical to the value proposition in the Cloud Computing application space. As Corporate get their heads around the value of application computing and development on platforms such as Windows Azure the demand for a new generation of developer will emerge. Developers who cannot just code to new levels of transactional and storage efficiency but can also THINK into the related business processes that the code is electrifying. In so doing developers will be instrumental in reduce the cost of the hosting cloud service through reduce Computing resource demand but reduce the subsequent bill to the app owner, while at the same time inject process efficiencies into the business as applications are re-engineered optimising business processes at the same time.

With our younger workforce, the majority of whom have grown up on technology are adept at finding and using information. Even in a complex landscape like the Internet, they are used to discovering, collecting, and organizing large amounts of info from various sources. Prime candidates in this new world of application development as cloud changes the IT effect on Business behaviours.

Having Grown up ‘connected’ Generation Y’ (Millennial Generation, Generation Next or Net Generation) behave as on ‘autopilot’ when choosing to source information digital. I would challenge many to know what the inside of a library looks like! Their social networking second nature is both an Achilles heel as well as an asset if correctly tapped. Fresh with new ideas, adept at working with diverse networks of information outside of work, they wish to do the same in work. Working collaboratively by instinct and generally unencumbered by conditioning, until it is imposed dissipating their creativity, or they go feral leading to information breaches as per the subject of my last blog.

The challenge is the lack of cohesion in the IT workforce or common foundation for discipline evolution to co-ordinate and permeate this at a pace that will allow practitioners to deliver value consistently and in the short term. Instead the piecemeal approach and jungle drums, or grape vine will drive this stimulated by economic imperative till it gets absorbed into the predominantly Vendor driven model of ‘Professional’ training and goes mainstream.