Jun 26
maybe. I read an article a while ago that I thought I agreed with but upon reflection, perhaps not so much. The article was a fairly accurate description of companies who continuously expound on how employees are the most important company asset. Then, when the economy or bad business practices put the company in financial difficulties, the first thing to go is the employees. How can an organization actually believe that its employees are it’s best asset and then when things get tough start handing out pink slips?
Well, perhaps it all depends on how you define valuable. When a company says its employees are it’s most valuable asset the assumption, made by the employees, is that the current individuals who make up the body of employees are of value. Another assumption the employees make is that the company would never get rid of it’s most valuable asset. Sadly I believe the employees are wrong in both of these assumptions in too many cases.
Many organizations believe that a valuable resource is an expendable and disposable yet renewable resource. In this case when the company starts talking about its valuable resources and tough economic times you might want to dust off your resume. In tough economic times like today we really need to be careful about our assumptions and definitions.
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written by Rob Caljouw
Jun 26
is a great concept and I’m most curious to see how it evolves. I believe it’s a given that this is where we are headed because the huge potential value in ideas like SaaS and PaaS.
There are, of course, many issues to overcome but that is simply a matter of time, effort and understanding. There is much discussion and debate about the notion of Cloud Computing and lots of vendors are positioning themselves within this market but what it all comes down to is a question of value. My first question when looking at any IT investment, large or small is, what is the value it adds? The initial value here is immediately obvious and easy to calculate but over the long term this value will increase.
Cloud Computing is simply the next logical step in the commoditization of computing infrastructure. It’s really no different than any other infrastructure service we enjoy today. Whether you compare it with the telephone system, the electrical grid or water and waste systems it really doesn’t matter, computing is going to become just another infrastructure service. It will be commoditized, standardized, ubiquitous and inexpensive.
This is one of those game changing ideas that will improve with adoption, it will indeed take time for us to move in this direction but I believe it is inevitable. Cloud Computing, as all things should, comes back to the question of value to an organization. The value added to most companies from IT comes through software, not from the fact that they happen to own rooms and racks full of servers. Where the software and/or data resides is not important to most users in the business community. The majority of business users want quick easy and safe access to the tools and information they need to do their job and they care little about some computer they have never heard of. It reminds me of a quote I heard many years ago as a definition of Client Server software when it was the latest thing in IT. “Before Client Server systems I couldn’t get my work done because the computer I was using was down. With Client Server computing I can’t get my work done because some computer I’ve never heard of is down”. So to the average business user Cloud Computing is no different than any other advancement in IT, they don’t care about it, they just want to get their work done.
The most interesting aspects of Cloud Computing are the economic and social change that it will bring. When you follow the notion of Cloud Computing to it’s logical conclusion you see the end of corporate IT as it is today. Cloud Computing simply eliminates the need for IT departments as they currently exist. The corporate computing environment and all of its associated overhead disappears and is replaced with commodity services from infrastructure service providers and value adding aggregators. Cloud Computing is an IT concept that will truly bring significant business transformation, the question is, are we in IT ready to deal with it?
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written by Rob Caljouw
