Cloud ROI

Yes, there is a problem counting ROI in Cloud computing as Joe McKendrick (@joemckendrick) tell in the post Cloud Computing's ROI Increasingly Elusive, Survey Finds out on Forbes but I will continue to count value, not just numbers all the time. To be able to count value we have to understand Cloud computing and why it should be considered and planned for at the upper levels.

Short break out from Joe McKendricks post:

"Perhaps it’s a result of cloud becoming so tightly interwoven with the business that the potential results may be more far-reaching than a single process or two. Or, perhaps, cloud adoption and usage is expanding deeper into business operations at a faster pace than

'Doomed?' on Outsourcemagazine

My latest post 'Doomed?' on Outsource Magazine is out.

Breakout:

"I ask myself, will it be a true shift where traditional IT outsourcing providers* becomes outmaneuvered by smaller service provider, cloud brokers, in-house IT departments and non IT service providers acting as orchestrators of future hybrid IT? A shift caused by:

• Smaller SPs are able to change when the market does. Faster and shorter step to new decisions. 

• Smaller SPs are able to operate, manage and orchestrate solutions earlier exclusively reserved the larger ITO providers. 

• Non-IT service providers from mature branches bring money, resources and trimmed processes in to a sometimes immature IT world. 

• In-house IT departments are able to orchestrate their IT solutions. They don’t have to focus on fundamental operations provided by IaaS, PaaS and A-/SaaS; they are able to concentrate on core/special services and work more innovative to bring value to core business. To become the internal trusted cloud broker to avoid de-centralised procurement/adoption of products and services. 

• The act of “Fat and happiness”: instead of working innovative (know, predict and tell what the customer needs in the future) ITOs only focus on now! 

• ITOs don’t use partnership to build success. They build everything on their own." 

Tell me what you think on Outsourcemagazine, here on the blog or just send me a mail.


ITO's, SP's, non-IT SP's, "end-customers": Of course MMind is able to discuss in detail how your business can deal with this.

 

'The DNA of Product Management' by Hunter Walk

Today I read the excellent post The DNA of Product Management on LinkedIn by Hunter Walk, Director Product Management at Google.

I really think this one is important for Product Managers but especially for the Management team and, to bad, even sometimes to board members.

I copy three important paragraphs from Hunter Walk's post:

"2) Seek collaboration, not necessarily consensus

Comment to: Cloud Service Providers Challenge Traditional IT Outsourcing

Short comment to the post 'Cloud Service Providers Challenge Traditional IT Outsourcing' by Stephanie Overby (@stephanieoverby) on CIO.com.

Short break out:

"the fastest growing segment of outsourcing--cloud computing services--is expected to nearly double from $3.4 billion in 2011 to $5 billion this year. Even more notable--infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will contribute 38 percent of the increment outsourcing growth in 2012, compared to 8 percent in 2011. "This is reflective of how difficult the current market

"Customisation of IT: sorry, but it’s NOT the future. Customerisation is!"

My second and latest column on Outsource Magazine: Customisation of IT: sorry, but it’s NOT the future. Customerisation is!


Short breakout:

"What to do (1) 

IT businesses have to walk away from seller-centric and buyer-centric scenarios to “swap-centric”, "customised standard", Lego-bricks or whatever you would like to call it.
IT providers have to listen to their customers and offer open standard services from which a customer can choose add-on services – either from the provider or from other service providers. Build up services in block: don’t customise a service if your goal isn’t to be that special services provider who will get paid for the effort you put in it. Plus,

'Businesses Don't Fail - Leaders Do' by Mike Myatt

Friday the 13th tomorrow. As with the post #CloudWisdom 13 you get luck.

Salute to the post 'Businesses Don't Fail - Leaders Do' by Mike Myatt (@mikemyatt) on Forbes.com. It's great check list for all:

- Board members analyzing their appointed management team.
- Employees evaluating its employer.
- Customers evaluating its providers.
- CxO's and management teams to verify their management.

Short break out:

"Why do businesses fail? If you’re willing to strip away all the excuses, explanations, rationalizations, and justifications for business failures, and be really honest in your analysis, you’ll find only one plausible reason -poor leadership. I’ve often said that real leaders refuse to take the credit for success, but they will always accept responsibility for failures. Harsh? Yes; but it goes with the territory."

I would say you could fail in only a few...if any...

Enjoy a really good read.

#CloudWisdom 12

CIO is one of the key positions in cloud adoption.

Strenghten your CIO's position in the management group. Support is needed from the IT operations department, the management group and the organisation. You won't succed in cloud if you don't translate tech to business and business to tech.

Comment to the last post

Hopefully my comment won't disappear now. If, here you go:

"Thanks for a good read. I so agree.

Reproduced and a bit changed (my first one disappeared):

Of course there are concerns about security, who to blame if it fails etc. And no doubt; cloud services should be secure, reliable and available. But my opinion is that cloud won't get people out of work. It's not like the IT is a decreasing market. Technicians are so needed even if adopting cloud services. We should see it as a possibility to evolve; it might end up in a different direction and role. Companies need to have technical experts, they need policies and trusted advisors, and they need orchestrators to wrap up the complete IT delivery.

It seems like discussions often end up in two teams; the tech team vs the management team. We have to silo and come closer; business to tech and tech to business. Just look at the change of the CIO-role the filter to tech and business. CIOs has an important role, has to be strong and should focus to meet the core business needs to a given budget. Some services will be cloud, and some not.

Cloud is in some way a change in IT delivery and we have to adopt some the services sooner or later, or maybe sooner than later.

Fighting a good reliable, secure and available solution is good. Fighting cloud just because you dont like it or just love the way you designed it might be read like retrogressive.

Also; think about working at a cloud service provider quite techy indeed."

'Cloud computing: why all of the vehemence?' by Dan Kusnetzky

Good read: 'Cloud computing: why all of the vehemence?' by Dan Kusnetzky.

Short break out:

"It would be wise of IT and facilities practitioners to focus on where and how new technology or new approaches can be of use to the organization rather than trying to fight them. Mainframes, minicomputers (now called midrange systems), distributed computing, client/server computing and the like are still found in nearly all medium to large organizations. They didn’t go away when a new approach or a new application was adopted."

I did comment it but it seems like the comment was removed. Really don't know why, it really wasn't controversial. Well, it might appear again later. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours.

Quality IT

Ok...THIS will be my last post...sorry.

Next week I will publish my post about good IT were I will quote a colleague at TeleComputing:

"Compared to buying cheap you only cry once when you buy quality!"

Happy New Year!

2012. How about my predictions?!

On Sunday morning 2012 hits us. A lot of lists and posts prevail about predictions in and about IT, cloud, Internet and more. I will give you some of my thoughts. They are based on my experience, things I read and hear off. The text itself is based on my trend notes written in TeleComputing’s Q4 newsletter and is now translated and in some places modified. I’m focusing more on some short basic to think about’s and reminders more than specifics like cloud, Big Data, Eco systems, BYO or social networking. Mine last longer than 2012 and point especially to service providers and the C-series.

A lot of things happening on the IT-market; what’s present, will increase and evolve in the future? Service provider’s needs to better listen and understand its customers core business and the C-series needs to better understand IT and how it can support the companies’ core business. We all have to be better prepared and plan for the future in time.

It’s very important that techniques to deliver IT as a service is secure, reliable and available because the service should be ditto. It also has to be modular, scalable and flexible to be able to support services from different ISV and sources, also through different techniques to different type of devices because of the consumerization trend BYO (Bring Your Own). Though; techniques are ”secondary”, don’t misunderstand me. Techniques are very important for the IT-department, the service provider (Cloud or not). To the customer it is the support to core business, functionality and availability that is important. This creates demand on the actors on the service provider market and IT departments; simple, functional and reasonable invoicing processes have to exist, and most important; the soft services like Service Desk, change management, perceptiveness, coordination and governance have to be excellent. The Orchestrator role is so important. It’s in these areas the settlement of being an actor on the service providing market or not.

Bullets;

The actor is either a service provider or an IT manager/-department. As a CxO; use it like a check list.

• The actor must be able to describe how a service brings benefits for the customer and how it kills the customers’ pains. Customer: “What’s in it for us?”
• The actor must be able to describe and motivate why underlying old techniques need to be upgraded or replaced to meet the future.
• The CIO role is more business- than technique oriented. The technique is the actors pleasant ”concern”, and it should be transformed to the CIO as business.
• The actor should be the customers’ market listener and whisperer. The actor should be a part of and contribute to increase the customers’ efficiency and productivity.
• CxO, not only CIO; you have to understand what IT can do for your business. You have to understand; availability and service hours are not for free.
• The actor should support the customer to be an attractive employer. People, especially young people, now a days looks of what the employer can do for them to succeed. Without good employees you as an employer won’t succeed in the future. Providing an attractive IT environment and policy is an important ingredient to attract the best.
• The actor should be the trusted adviser. Some might say it’s a buzz word but partnership between the customer and the actor is a very important key to successful IT as a Service. But never forget, it happens to often and the service provider wakes up with a horse head in the bed; it really takes two to tango!
• Standard becomes customized, customized becomes standard.
  My prediction is that standard services will increase and customized decrease. Because of economic and integration reasons this change will come, it is too expensive and complex to customize. Companies will customize their organization to the service opposite to the reverse, it’s a change but it has to be done. At the same time the standardized services become more customizable with standardized interface to integrate two or more systems /services.

This is my last post 2011 and I will be back 2012.

May your service provider be good to you next year too.

 

Happy New Year!

TeleComputing News No 4 2011 (in Swedish)

TeleComputings News No 4 2011 (in Swedish) is out!

Posts by and about me.

Enjoy!

"10 steps for dealing with criticism"

'10 steps for dealing with criticism', a really good article about dealing with criticism by Alan Norton.

Break out:

"I am not going to tell you that dealing with criticism is easy. On the contrary. Analytical thinkers are convinced that their way is the only way. I have seen it all too often in my own family when a discussion amongst the analytical thinkers soon becomes contentious. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Follow these 10 steps to get a better grip on the unwanted and unsolicited critical words hurled in your direction."

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-steps-for-dealing-with-criticism/2834

Wish I followed some of them sometimes... ;)

I have a dream

Have you ever build your car or just for fun the car of your dreams with a web app? Several of the biggest company offers this service. I’ve tried several of them and the best one, according to me, is the one from Audi (build your car web app).

I have a dream;

What if someone could build an application that was able to put a complete IT outsourcing app? An app who could handle sourced private clouds, public clouds etc. Choosing Service B Service A becomes NA. Choosing Cloud service A “forces” you to choose Communication Service A, B or C where C might be the customers’ existing WAN. And so on… During the end of the configuration session you have to pass some questions; how about customer specific applications, options suitable for the solution etc. When finished you get an overview to verify. Click print and you have a proposal for your customer.

If the proposal gets accepted you open the solution again and choose to create an agreement.

I know this is complex but wouldn’t it be nice? This would be thee app for the Orchestrator.