Rethinking IT in the cloud computing era
November 11, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: James Urquhart.
IT departments need not go away in a computing world increasingly concerned with cloud computing and complex service-oriented systems, but they will have to change. IT has to let go of trying to control everything and focus on coordinating and enhancing things that other people control. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about IT and its role in the era of cloud computing, API-driven development and increasing interconnectivity. As enterprise computing moves from a server-centric to an application-centric operations model, what happens to the role of IT in a corporation? What is IT to cloud, anyway?
Nick Carr famously wrote about the lack of differentiation that IT brings to the business in his 2004 book Does IT Matter?. His argument was essentially that as computing is more and more expected in business, the things IT does for the business provide less and less differentiation. That means that each business owning its own information technology makes less and less sense…
If you believe Carr’s vision, cloud computing is one logical outcome. In fact, Carr himself made the argument in his subsequent 2008 book, The Big Switch, where he argued that the increasingly commoditized nature of computing would drive it toward a utility model, like electricity or water. It’s a compelling vision, and one that helped to ignite the cloud computing market we know today….
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/rethinking-it-in-the-cloud-computing-era/