As the world gets driven more and more by cloud-based services, what do tomorrow’s operations jobs look like? A decade and more ago ops managers were blue chip contractors, assembling custom-tuned components into environments a well-known set of visitors could use for a prescribed set of tasks. In tomorrow’s cloud-based world the picture that’s emerging is one in which a much larger and more diverse set of visitors needs to be accommodated for purposes that vary widely depending on when and why they show up. Their expectation is that the cloud infrastructure makes a wide range of capabilities available when they need it, and that the underlying platform will be dynamically allocated to simply make it possible at that time. In this sense the new operations manager has to be aware of the capabilities of a variety of ‘venues’ (three-tiered applications, web-scale apps, elastic storage pools, etc.) and ready to let them out for exactly what the renter needs, now. The mix is larger. The versatility of functions is greater. And the client mix is constantly expanding.
In this way the operations manager of the future is partly an expert realtor who maintains a pool of properties ready to be leveraged for what each client needs, ready to be reallocated to the next one when the first one is done. The realtor gets known for the quality of the properties that are offered. And the clients get referred because the promptness of service and the versatility to support their many distinct needs has been shown. The realtor simply has to ensure the range of properties on offer continues to be value to the clients who may want to visit.
