My comment to 'Cloud: disruptive good, disruptive bad'

My comment to the post 'Cloud: disruptive good, disruptive bad' by Phil Wainewright on ZDNet.

Short break out from Phil's post:

"With cloud, the tables have finally turned on the technologists. Adoption of cloud in the enterprise is disruptive in a bad way for IT and in a good way for business. For everyone in IT, it means radical changes to working practices and learning many new skillsets, while existing skills become redundant, sometimes overnight. Today’s old-fashioned jobs are in fields such as database administration, server management and systems integration, with many organisations handing over those tasks wholesale to cloud providers who can automate them at scale. While IT suffers, the business finds cloud brings vastly improved productivity to existing skills while adding huge new opportunities for innovation and business development."

My comment to the post, or rather my comment to the post and the comments:

3 problems

Personally I think we have huge problems:

• If; IT solutions = something I don’t want to be blamed for when the sh… hits the fan because “don’t look at me, the idea wasn’t mine”.  If “=”; then you should consider: no upgrades allowed, drop the internet connection NOW etc.
• If business decision makers decides how the companies’ IT solutions should be designed. Note! The solution, not single services.
• If IT departments by deciding techniques decides how to use IT and run business.  

But, if IT departments don’t bring innovation, join evolution and start listen to and understand business needs the business decision makers AND users will decide what they want to use. The CIO role is “oh so” important – translate tech<>business.

You might say millions of users are affected but which company has millions of own users? If a cloud service stops your company will be affected (the rest of the millions isn’t your problem). If your local systems stop your company will be affected (this is your problem only). But if you as a service provider have millions of users you will do EVERYTHING to get the service ok again and you most probably have the resources to solve the problem. This might not always be the same with a local system operated by local IT departments.

Deal with the cloud. Be innovative and listen to the organizational needs. Find the best service to the best price, vouch for security, reliability and availability and tell the pros and cons. Otherwise the IT department has to deal with the problem of a fragmented IT solution… and then you definitely get blamed.

At the same time; if these problems exist you most probably have a management problem too.