|
In my recent e-book #OccupyIT: A Technology Manifesto for the Cloud, Mobile,
and Social Era (http://www.aiim.org/occupyIT), I talk about the revolutionary
changes that are impacting how we make enterprise technology decisions.
On the one hand, we have "the business," awed and impressed by the changes and speed of implementation in the consumer technology space (think Facebook, Google, Twitter), asking their IT departments why enterprise technology has to be so "old fashioned," why implementation needs to take so long, and why enterprise technology has to be so darn expensive.
On the other hand, we have "IT", struggling to maintain order amidst the chaos, and struggling with expectations from "the business" that are escalating exponentially. IT spending by IT is flat, while IT spending by "the business" is increasing significantly. Clearly the traditional world of enterprise IT is changing.
In many ways, the cloud and open source revolutions are two sides of the same coin. They stem from the desire to buy technology "by the glass," to buy technology in which the release cycles are frequent and manageable rather than long and frightening, and you can "try before you buy" (and especially before you scale!).
According to a recent global CIO survey, 60 percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving a competitive advantage. The figure is nearly twice the number of CIOs who said they would utilize the cloud in the previous study.
The impact of the cloud and open source, though, will be massive beyond the immediate revenues that will be classified in industry studies as cloud and open source because they fundamentally change the way we look at IT services, how we pay for these services within our organization (capital spending versus operating), and how we view upgrade paths (and who is responsible for these upgrades). Organizations that do not incorporate rapid and flexible implementation and adoption models into their thinking do so at their own peril. |