Outsource vs Cloud: What Roles and Function Will Remain IT? Career Planning

If all the servers go to the cloud (unlikely to happen), the question is what remains in IT? What is the mission for IT in an outsourced world? 

I can think of things like governance, service catalog, vendor management off the top of my head.  What else?

Comments

[Steve Chambers]

Hey Rodrigo, where would you put the creative folks who build solutions on top of infrastructure - perhaps in house Application folks, cloud experts, solution + service designers...

[Pamela Ruiz]

Adding to Steve's comments inhouse service designers that understand the business is important. As well as Service Level Management to measure quality of service, internal Service Delivery Managers as the single point of contact to drive improvements and continual delivery of the service...

[Cary King]

Let's assume that the IT organization will retain the responsibility to serve as stewards of the IT assets and as agents for the organization's acquisition and operation of IT functions. Organizations that have outsourced all of a function, often find that, over time, the company to whom they've outsourced has somewhat different goals and interests from the organization.

If so, then IT will need to retain core intelligence and capability to plan, monitor, manage and audit the services of outsourcers. A metaphor would be that IT would serve as the expert Prime Contractor that would manage the overall service delivery and do make/buy decisions for the individual pieces that "subcontractors" perform.

It seems to me that IT would still have to retain competence in governance including infrastructure standardization; portfolio and project management; work management supervision; customer facing relationship management; asset management along with vendor management; financial management - budgets, service costing, etc.; capacity; availability; continuity; problem; transition oversight management; etc.