I wrote the following for a newsletter that a friend of mine is publishing out to her company's clients and contacts. It's a distillation of much that I've been thinking about recently:
Cloud computing is reaching the apex of its hype curve at the moment as established IT service companies jostle for position in the market. The inevitable disillusioned backlash is poised, but Cloud is having a profound impact on the future of IT departments in all but the biggest of corporations; put simply, in four of five years time, most IT departments won't exist in the form they do today.
There are two competing forces that are giving rise to this evolution: Cloud-based services negate the need for technology expertise in-house; and the new generation of IT services are focused on the softer side of enabling teamworking rather than the traditional realms of number-crunching and process automation. What will emerge is an environment where CIOs need to reposition themselves as the facilitators of collaboration (becoming Chief Collaboration Officers, perhaps) rather than providers of systems.
There is a virtuous relationship on offer here. Cloud computing allows software-facilitated business change projects to run without being hampered by the technology failures that usually dog success. At my company Imagination (a global communications agency with around 500 people in nine countries) we began a move into a Cloud environment at the beginning of 2010, initially by moving core collaboration tools onto the Google Apps platform. What has been refreshing about the project is that, released from the shackles of software and hardware configuration, we've been able to help start to drive improvements in the way in which the business operates through focus on helping our people to help improve their own lots.
Our project objectives – strengthening relationships with our clients, improving engagement between our people, and driving value for both our clients and Imagination – are starting to be realised, but are maybe atypical of a project that, from one perspective, was about introducing a new email platform. The hundreds of thousands of pounds that we are saving as part of the move are only a part of the benefits that the transformation is providing. Seeing people and teams discovering new, better, ways to work as a result of the initiative is where deeper value (and competitive advantage) will be found.
mmitII 