An interesting day yesterday spent at the 4th Cloud Circle Forum in Victoria. A theme that cropped up a few times amongst delegates was that the hype of Cloud was just another step in the insource/outsource hokey-kokey that the IT industry periodically goes through. I'm convinced that this kind of thinking is going to lead to a lot of IT folk finding themselves surprised when unemployable in the coming years.
Whilst there is no doubt that many IT vendors and integrators are re-badging products with cloud prefixes at the moment (and is it just me or does the new MS cloud logo look suspiciously like a bunch of Chrome OS logos stuck together?), what is happening in the broader world of the Web means that IT is under competitive threat the like of which it has never seen before.
Put it like this: I don't need corporate CRM when I have Linked In; I don't need the corporate collaboration infrastructure when I have Google, DropBox and even Facebook; I don't need my work Blackberry when I have my iPhone; I don't need my work PC when I have my iPad…
Bottom line… I don't need my IT department.
"But who will provide governance?" old IT will wail. Well, the more 'governance' that we put in the way of our clients using the services we provide them, the more chance that they'll go elsewhere anyway. Oh, and yes. They are really clients and customers now… Not mere 'users'… You are working in a truly competitive market now, and your clients have real choice.
Many of the IT vendors aren't helping with this industry denial. Although particularly the Systems integrators are probably sharing it, as their services are under threat through all of this too. It's been a long while since I've seen as many 'layer model' diagrams as I did yesterday, and quite frankly I'm not sure why any of them were important.
It's an incredible time that we find ourselves in, with huge opportunities. It's a shame that so many in our field seem to be sleepwalking into it.
mmitII 