The Impact of Cloud Computing on Companies and People

Corporate IT is in the midst of its biggest ever change. Cloud computing and other developments, like smart devices, have the potential to massively reduce cost, reduce resource consumption, lower energy bills and improve 21st century employees’ productivity and joy. Not a bad outcome to have in the current economic environment, with frequent discouraging news! The opportunity is not in each technology though, but in the sum of them all, considered with focus, attention to detail and depth. That’s where we want to focus the attention of IT Management: at the crossroads of cloud, user empowerment, sustainability, and human productivity. Let’s make a new start. Daily, it seems, we hear news of another new cloud start-up gaining venture capital financing, and this is significant because it signifies another source of innovation in the ICT industry. But in the end, computing will be relevant only at the point of application - what is it for, what does it do? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos asserts computing power will become the next utility after electricity, and he’s right. But ConEdison does not make washing machines or iPads: it powers these appliances. So let’s celebrate the innovation of cloud computing and move on to leveraging it. It’s about the application of the technology. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce business considerations which should drive our implementation of the most recent developments in computing, including cloud and smart devices. We will also talk about the company of the future, and how it may operate very differently. For IT technologists, the range of Cloud solutions to evaluate is now vast. For end-users meanwhile, IT services are still somewhere between the corporate client/server model of 15 years ago, and the consumer IT world of iPads, App Stores and WebTV. We will address how to start merging these two worlds, and how to manage “Bring your own Device” effectively, while retaining corporate security. We will also discuss the difference in expectations that employees now have in our workplaces. Dubbed “the consumerization of IT”, we will analyze these trends and introduce some examples to keep our users motivated, effective, and experiencing much greater job satisfaction. In the end, IT must serve two masters - the company as an institution, and the people within it. The former tends to seek security over openness; and efficiency over effectiveness. The people that make up the company, while abiding by rules of “the IT department”, would probably rather operate as they do at home. Bridging that divide is our starting point, and along with cloud computing, forms the basis for successful 21st century IT.

- by Alicia Trelles-Duckett