Cloudy With A Chance of Miracles...

Cloud will fail for the reasons just about every other IT initiative does and that is almost complete intractability of every Corporate IT department in the world and their ability to resist change. 

There will always be some reason why it can't work here. 

Of course there is lots of enthusiasm at the moment and lots of CIOs telling vendors and their peers that they are going great guns with Cloud; of course, they are surrounded by people telling them what they want to hear. I am sure that a lot of money is being spent on Cloud-enabled technology; the branding of VMware as some kind of magic cloud bean enables IT departments to say 'Yes, we're doing Cloud; look we've got lots of VMware deployed!'

These are the very same IT departments who five years ago who would have told you that they had embraced ITIL (and we can argue whether ITIL is a good or bad thing) but there sure were a lot of people claiming that they were implementing ITIL. Of course when you started to ask questions, they had implemented their own tweaked version of ITIL because ITIL wasn't really appropriate to their organisation. And then if you dug a bit more, what you actually found is that nothing had really changed and still the IT department merrily carried on in its own sweet way. 

And so I feel that most Cloud initiatives will be the same. Too many people with vested interests who are unwilling to expose their organisations to the level of change and scrutiny that is going to be needed to implement Cloud. 

I'm sure Chuck and other vendor 'leaders' talk to some very enthusiastic CIOs who are all about embracing the Cloud but in five years time will we be scratching our heads and asking what's changed? 

Cloud will be the new ITIL; just wait for Cloud v2 and Cloud v3.

But it really doesn't have to be this way however it needs some significant changes which are hard for many people to digest and get their head around. It's not all about IT people changing either.

Firstly, people need to understand the value of IT and not just the cost of IT. Let's take email for example; when email goes down, many companies seem to come to a grinding halt; so the email service has a value. The question needs to be asked what that value is, what can my company do now which it could not do without email. Perhaps it enables the company to communicate with its customers in a more timely manner and that has value. Do we actually know what that value is? Businesses need to ascribe value to the services that the IT department provide and perhaps they might come to the conclusion that they don't value some services.

Secondly, IT people need to stop operating under an atmosphere of fear; if the services provided are ascribed business value, some of the fear should be removed. Once value is understood, enhancing value is actually possible and perhaps at that point, implementing change to enhance value becomes an imperative not something to be resisted. IT people need to be proud of the service that they provide and not slightly ashamed; this is not about geek pride but a case of being able to say that we do a great job.

Thirdly, IT leaders need to stand up and say 'We believe what we do has value and we are not just a cost but we are looking for ways to improve the value of our service!' Too many IT leaders are falling into the trap of believing that their services are too expensive and hence find themselves in a constant spiral of negative evaluation. Actually most of them have little real idea as to what the value of the services that they provide actually is. 

Perhaps when you find such an organisation, let me know....I might want to work there!

Comments

[Chuck Hollis]

Martin

True. There is no substitute for hard metrics. Indeed, I see so many IT initiatives that either overachieve or underachieve -- but no one really knows! Other parts of the business are held under much greater scrutiny -- why is it that IT is so often exempt?

One of the best practices I've seen is the employment of external consultants to independently define and measure results. That's what we do here internally.

-- Chuck