NOTE: I found this in my archives. It was first published as a comment on the eBizQ website in July, 2011.
I don't think it's the cloud that needs to evolve per se (because it just will), it's our way of thinking that needs to evolve. What I mean by this is that we have reached a point where traditional technology constraints are being broken down every day, but we are still constraining our thought and our vision to what we are comfortable with and the way things have always been...when we need to be imagining what could be possible with the cloud.
Data is just one aspect of the cloud, as a few folks here have already mentioned. But instead of thinking in constrained terms about where to store data and how to structure data, our thought process needs to be more around what we can do with that data...or even what we can do with data that doesn't yet exist today but can be enabled by the cloud. The proliferation of could-based services that enable us to do things that were never possible before in concert with the ability to collect and look at data in ways never before possible creates endless possibilities...if we can just imagine what we want to do, the cloud will naturally adapt and evolve to enable whatever we can think up.
The shift to the cloud has already had a profound impact on many of the IT organizations that I've worked with in the past several years. The descriptive analysis:
- IT is no longer the team that engages us as the "front door" to the organization, even on projects that will require significant technical design work. I am seeing in 90% of our engagements that we are being engaged directly by the line of business closest to the business problem that needs to be solved.
- I can neatly split IT's involvement into two camps when it comes to project participation - cheerleaders and heel-draggers. When IT comes into a project not only fully aligned with the vision and objectives of the business, but speaking the same language of the business and even serving as business advocates, you can almost feel electricity in the air as the entire project team drives towards a common goal...it's like the specific technology just becomes an asterisk and IT takes a leadership role in the design of complex processes and systems rather than getting entrenched in the 1's and 0's. On the other hand, when I see IT as reluctant survivalists in an organization, their participation has become a fairly predictable pattern - show up late to the project kickoff meeting with pissed off looks on their faces, alternating between disinterestedly flipping through the pages of the project documentation and scanning through email on their Blackberries (because God forbid we should ever allow iPhones or other modern mobile devices on our secure network), and then either not returning after a break or making a staged dramatic exit to rush off to put out the fire-du-jour; then, after two weeks of the rest of the project team building positive momentum, IT will email us a 172 page "standards" document that cloud technology can never possibly live up to because it mandates the use of technology and architectural patterns that are outdated by a minimum of 5 years...the project then goes into perpetual swirl, and IT "wins" because the disruptive cloud technology is kept at bay until the next round.
The prescriptive analysis:
- IT becomes the keeper of the SLAs and manages the service portfolio, but the role of IT also becomes more profound in that technical folks think technically...we can see order in chaos and complexity. This ability to think systematically will become the bedrock of IT's role in larger organizations, as system and process design will be even more important in the cloud era, the shift however is in the fact that IT will be designing highly abstracted systems that assemble myriad services provided outside of the walls of the company.
- The entire concept of IT as the provisioner of devices and connectivity goes away. The (take this with as much gender neutrality as possible) "IT Guy" that crawls around under your desk setting up your new Windows "box" or "laptop" gets replaced by the Apple Store or Best Buy. The consumerization of IT accelerates in the coming years, IT will no longer dictate what devices you can or can't use, but instead will have to shift focus to enabling company employees and partners to access information anytime and anywhere, obviously in a way that upholds the privacy and security requirements of the organization.
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