Cloud: We’re Just Wagging the Dog
December 1, 2011
I read a nice analysis of cloud computing by Joe McKendrick this week – it’s at a sort-of-competing website, so I can’t link to it – that said, in essence, IT is and will be driving the cloud, rather than the other way around.
I agree. Cloud is the tail and IT is still the dog. No one should be motivated to "migrate toward the cloud" just because there were 10,000 people at the recent Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. No one should migrate toward the cloud just because every technology vendor now has either a solid cloud strategy or compelling cloudwashing strategy.
But yet, in its role as the tail, cloud computing is still part of the beast overall. The real disconnect in most enterprises remains that yawning gap between the business and IT sides. I don’t know if that gap will ever be closed. There is more lip service given to "business and IT alignment" than there is to tax reform…
This reality means that technology writers, analysts, and consultants will always have jobs – it’s a tremendous Full-Employment Act for the likes of us. But it does nothing to improve the prospects of cloud computing, of optimized IT, or of what should be true 21st-century businesses.
New Big Data
Real-time dataflows and analytics – and the new form of Big Data they create – are combining with social networking to create the outlines of 21st-century businesses, but the ability to handle, let alone interpret, all this data effectively is the biggest challenge facing enterprises today.
Others (including me) have noted that we are still at a very early point in the evolution and deployment of cloud computing. Cloud has not been overhyped, in my opinion, and its increasingly squishy definitions don’t alarm me. What does alarm me is the idea that this is a fad, just another short-term buzzword, and something that will lose all meaning as more companies give it their own meaning.
Readers of my past articles know that I loathe the idea of the Acme Consulting Co’s simplistic, supercilious hypecycle, even as I embrace technical oversimplifications of cloud in its many incarnations.
I embrace the latter because, again, we need to think of cloud as the tail of the dog (not the hair of the dog, as that is a different subject entirely). A wagging tail means a happy dog, and a happy dog gets that way by enjoying what’s happening. A happy dog lives to please its master, just as companies should live to serve their customers.
Ruff! Ruff!
A happy dog is also using its charms to make the master feed it, just as companies need their customers to feed them by buying their products and services.
What can your enterprise do to make its customers happier? What sorts of non-stalking (eg, non-CarrierIQ) personal information can it use to craft what its customers need? How can it anticipate customer needs? And these days, how can it be effective in addressing endless social-media streams?
Only when a company’s business and IT sides can fully cooperate on what the company wants to do – where it wants to go – should the words "cloud computing" enter the conversation. Until then, we’re all just wagging the dog.