Leading Change in the Age of the Cloud

In December of 2014, the University of Notre Dame’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) announced its “Cloud First” strategy. The strategic goal of the initiative is to espouse a technology implementation strategy that lays out a technology adoption strategy with the following order of preferences: 1. Use software provided and hosted by vendors in the cloud, 2. Adopt cloud-based data-centers for implementing what previously had been on-premise solutions, and 3. Reduce local implementations to just the handful of technology solutions that have special needs. Our practical objective is to move 80 percent of the campus technology server and service infrastructure into the cloud by December of 2017. As a campus technology partner and an occupant in the OIT-managed data center, the Hesburgh Libraries’ IT organization is aligning our own technology strategy with the OIT’s goal. The focus for this article is primarily on managing this change in our organization, especially as it relates to staff. The article covers the various strategies and techniques we have used to make change successful and uses the cloud initiative as a vehicle to describe those strategies in action.