Patrick Gray from TechRepublic last week released a blog post titled Why the “cloud” doesn’t matter. In it he points out that cloud computing is just another form of corporate outsourcing, which corporations have already been doing for a century. He goes on to claim that evaluating cloud services is a simple “make vs. buy” decision, and suggests that viewing the cloud in this manner is the only way to extract any real value from it. His overall point is that if we surround the cloud with a bunch of marketing hype and present it as the magic cure all for all your IT ailments, we will only do ourselves a disservice by setting false expectations that we can’t deliver on.
I respectfully disagree as I believe he is looking at cloud only from an infrastructure point of view. There is a complete different approach to cloud, based around the concepts of Software-as-a-Service and Everything-as-a-Service. But before I get into that, let me describe our vision of how cloud computing is going to change the role of the CIO.
A number of years ago we asked line of business people what percentage of their business processes changed more than once a year, and they came back with 40-45%. We then asked CIO’s how many of their applications were changed more than once a year and they came up with 5-10%. Business people are tired by IT’s inability to address their changing needs. They have to use Excel and other tools to bridge the gap.
So, what is the answer? Business processes consist of a number of process steps, some manual, other automatic, that are executed in a sequence. When changes occur to a business process it is mostly which steps have to be used and when. These steps are supported by “services” contained within applications. So, it’s important for IT to expose those services allowing the business people to line up the appropriate services. And those services can be sourced from different locations, from the CIO’s data center, from cloud services.
This is the real scoop in the cloud space. The CIO should become the strategic service broker, leaving the responsibility of the business process with the line of business people. Using an aggregation platform, he/she can then source services from different origins. Services developed and run internally can be mixed with services from the public cloud. So, think about being able to offer to users within the same service catalog, SAP services running within the enterprise and Salesforce.com services.
Actually, we may even want to go one step further. For the forcible future, enterprise CIOs will have to operate cloud based and legacy environments concurrently. They may want to avoid different access mechanisms for users. Wouldn’t it be great if, although the services are running in very different environments, the user could access them transparently? Encapsulating legacy applications with web services is one way to do this. Although a number of features available in the cloud may not easily be available in the legacy environment (metering being one of them), integrating both greatly facilitates life of the user.
The CIO now runs an aggregation platform allowing him to provide his users with the services they require, whether those are running in the enterprise legacy environment, in the enterprise cloud or in the public cloud. If, using a business process management software, the business users are now responsible for the design of the processes, they can call upon the appropriate service to perform the functions required. If the process has to be changed, they can redesign the order in which the services are called upon. As long as they do not need a new service, they no longer need to call upon IT to perform the changes. Responsibilities are now nicely delineated.
To run such environment requires putting in place a strong governance model. Business and IT jointly agree upon which services are required, manage the service lifecycle, from acquisition/development to end-of-life. That is new for many companies. It is a key element for making the model work. If not in place, the tension between business and IT will remain as the business will not get access to the appropriate services in time. Putting governance in place increases communication, improves discipline and manages development costs better, so it really makes sense to implement even if you do not plan to go as far as what is described here.
Is what I describe above cloud 2.0, or do you feel companies are ready to implement such approaches today? Tell me what you think.
