How many ideas do IT departments have in a given week? Loads. In a year? Hundreds. Over time the brain power in your average IT team is prodigious. If harnessed it could send a man to Mars no doubt. It is an awesome force albeit uncontrolled and random. Not all IT departments mind you!
But all these ideas are not the same as the big ones being made. Do the people making the big decisions – the CxO people – have similar ideas ? Do they listen to the IT departments or do they know better? What is the process of getting good ideas into a forum to discuss with peers the suitability for further investigation.
Google employees are encouraged to brainstorm ideas with colleagues once a week and rewarded if their idea gets sponsorship from above.
But what if you only have one idea? Lets say the whole business is aligned to one major initiative. Well the cloud shift is proving to be this single minded objective for many.
Some will argue this is correct because people cannot cope with too many ideas on the go at the same time, and need to focus on few to be successful. Very true but as we know cloud computing is a massive leap and the thought that it may be the only one idea you have – Is well – DANGEROUS.
(Quotation attributed to Emile Chartier 1868 – 1951), a French philosopher, journalist, and pacifist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Chartier )
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Paul's Blog 
How about this for a quote for your blog…………………….
“The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.” by Dale Carnegie
Strikes me that people who dare to use the cloud will get the furthest.
Leon
thank you. I will use it at some point.
Brummie.
Im an EA in the US. The cloud discussion only works if you have a team focused on all aspects of the impact to you infrastructure. We took an early decision two years ago to create a think tank that ran alongside the day to day IT operations. This group was chaired by our CIO and focused on alternative outcomes if we selected cloud as a delivery mechnanisms for IT projects. This we tested the water and in certain places we discovered cloud was the best. Basically we ran cloud as a control to validate our thinking. This got us working well with vendors who bought into our strategy and also meant the business knew we had a cloud roadmap but not necessarily a open strategy for cloud. Now we are in a really good place as we migrate from one place to the other.Hope this helps.
Totally right with last post. Our focus right now is running the shop as efficiently as we can. Back to basics is our motto. Focus is on reducing expenses whilst moving at the speed of the business. So juggling but making sure any cloud discussion is one where all parts of the busienss are involved. Its not an IT chat anymore.We are all about having an architecture strategy and sticking to it. Cloud is one component – not the whole.
Olsen “Rebel” Desidera
I had a conversation the other day with an old customer and he said a few sobering things which made me think a lot. His experience was that IT was no longer at the decision making table like it used to. I found this intriguing as I would have thought on balance IT was more represented than ever before. But he disagreed. He went on to say that the discussions about business strategies, goals, top line/bottom line growth, financial results, forecasting, sales leads, supply chain, etc. etc., do not include any discussion of IT. He felt that this was not because IT wasnt invited to such meetings, but that because IT and all it “may” bring to the table, isn’t driving the business. He said that stakeholders understand the value and benefits of IT tools the problem was that IT was just a tool – nothing more. So i got to thinking about whether cloud becomes the master of all tools and is so much more an inevitable outcome.
BRUMMIE ( pondering the discussion )
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