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We constantly hear about “pie in the sky” stories – I tell them myself all the time – about how cloud computing is going to transform the world. Yet we rarely show examples of this type of transformation. So this is me taking the time to give a personal example in my business life.

In 2007 I was consulting at a large pharmaceutical company in the content management space. Its content management solution was a few of years old with no plan to update in the near future. They had teams of developers that I managed. They had a separate support staff. They had a team of admins. They had a bunch of boxes that ran in some data center far, far away. Publishing happened twice a day when the publishing job ran. Only certain files were allowed to be uploaded. Searching was only capable through metadata. It probably cost in the low millions of dollars to keep it up running* but things ran smoothly and people were happy even if it wasn’t the most user-friendly environment. Yes there were better solutions out there, but nothing drastically that much better.

* That is just people dollars. I’m not even counting software, hardware, and power costs

Now let’s compare that to today. Once again, I am consulting in the content management space with a different client. This time I am advising on a content management implementation from Salesforce.com that is incredibly easy to use, is infinitely more searchable, has a plethora of features that were not even dreamed of in 07 ,* gets updated twice a year, does not reside in the corporate “walls,” and most importantly, it requires ZERO IT resources within the organization. Not only does it not require any internal IT resources, it is being implemented by the sales organization instead of an IT group. The implementation is taking four weeks (including content migration) with one person, and requires no hardware.

* Was social even an online term in 07?

That isn’t the world of tomorrow. That is the world of today. Organizations are beginning to be able to turn a switch and get whatever technology enables them to do business the best.  The concept of the “walls” of corporation are beginning to crumble because it can be much more efficient to do something outside your company. If we believe that the  companies who adapt the best and fastest are going to be the future leaders of tomorrow, then this is the level of operational transformation you need to be thinking about.

You have to be asking the why questions. Why do we house certain operations internally? Why does our organization do things that are not core to our business? Why can’t we let other companies do our non-critical business functions? Why do we have walls (both virtual and physical) and buildings? There are risks for sure, but you have to ask if they are worth the savings. The technology is there to change the structure of a corporation to be more profitable and to empower employees to do more with less. The smart companies are already testing and figuring this out; the change will happen faster than you think.

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

I think this is a valuable lesson for anyone in the emerging technology arena. We spend so much time telling ourselves the story because you have to learn things at an accelerated rate, that we never sit down to rewrite our story and remove everything that doesn’t matter. We get so caught up in the act of story telling that we never come back and turn it into the Shawshank redemption. I’m looking at you social media experts, and you cloud computing experts, and at myself. We could all be better at our jobs by sitting down and rewriting our stories.

Let’s start then with what was a very bad news to me… Google Wave is dead! I have to admit that I am not surprised even though I was a fervent defender of it. What I thought could become a tsunami in the digital communication word appeared to be just stagnant water and there are several reasons for that.

You have to admit that Google way of introducing it and improving it was quite disappointing.  What was supposed to be  real innovation has been launched as a basic lab test. Surely, it was launched in the same way as Gmail has been in the old times but the offer, in the eyes of the public, was too close to Gmail to create the buzz around invites. And what’s the point to have an invite if you can’t use the tool with you friends… At least with Gmail, you could send mails to your friends to show you got the invite. The first month with Wave, I had only 3 friends. There are better ways to test and enjoy a new tool! Why not have tried it first as an extension in Gmail?

But more importantly, I believe a lot of people didn’t see the point of it. It was a too close to emails and not that user-friendly. The co-editing feature looked fun but now you have it on Google doc (maybe thanks to the development in Wave…) and it was a nice new opened protocol but most people just didn’t care.

I am sad I have to say as I was expecting it to be a good new tool but as always with Google, this test will lead to improvements in their new products and I’m fine with that.  What I also like is that I believe they have learnt that they can’t just throw stuff at people and expect all the time to get great results (or did they really learn??)

Listen Foursquare, before I say anything I want you to know that no matter what happens we will always be friends. I’ve enjoyed our time together and I have had a lot of fun, but unfortunately I’m leaving you. Now before you get all crazy on me and start throwing APIs, tips, and to-dos around, I want you to know it’s not you, it’s me. I find nothing wrong with your competitions, or your minimalist good looks.  At first, when we were new, just the idea of checking in and competing with my friends was enough for me. You were my first introduction into the world of location-based sharing, and I will always remember you for that, but now I’m at a different place in my life. Not only do I want the ability to check in, but now I want more out of our relationship. I want to know as much as I can about places before I check in and quite frankly the tips are just not enough. I want the ability to call, to visit a website, to read reviews, to see pictures, and a whole bunch of other stuff before I visit. Have I been seeing Yelp? Well, it won’t do any good to lie to you now. Yes, I’ve been seeing Yelp. Is that all? Well no, that’s not it. I’m also seeing Facebook Places as well, but that’s really just a friend thing, nothing serious. I’m sorry it had to end this way, but as the saying goes:

“All things end badly, or else they wouldn’t end.”

Goodbye Foursquare.

Image by vandango via Flickr

I just finished reading Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee, and one of my favorite parts was a chapter titled “Red Herrings and Long Hauls.”* As a consultant who specializes in using new technologies to enable workers to better do their jobs, the most common obstacle I face is fear. It’s not that the technologies are scary, but people fear that somehow some piece of technology is going to turn everyone into Dr. Evil clones.

* I feel like hyper links killed  the act of underlining words. Therefore, I propose that underlining to be stricken from the grammar rules vortex unless it is used to provide a link to some other document.

I would like to state for the record that if you are worried that your employees are going to do one of the following:

• Start a terrorist plot to take over the world
• Start offending coworkers personally or sexually
• Start a porn shop
• Post intentionally incorrect information to mislead people
• Start a Klan rally
• Become a spy for the soviets and sell secretes (apologies to my Russian friends. We all have spies)
• Spam the company with kitten videos

just because some new piece of technology came about…well…I would start looking for a new job immediately because you work in a very strange place. And while I’m exaggerating a bit, I’m doing it for a reason. There is nothing different about the way people will act with any social networking system, or blog, or knowledge management tool, or link sharing engine, or wiki than they do now within a company. People have a common sense of what is acceptable in the work place and that isn’t going to change just because they have access to a Yammer account. Sure there may be a couple of examples at the extreme end of the curve but really it is no different than the extreme examples of craziness that we have all seen before the words social networks, or web 2.0 ever existed. The difference is now you’ll be able to spot it early, easily, and be able to remove it. Because remember kids: emails may seem private, until the government, the HR department, or your boss comes asking for them.

• Does anyone else do this? It never crossed my mind: TwitZip: Hyperlocal Twitter, via your ZIP code http://bit.ly/dtKlsz
• Is the web dieing – http://bit.ly/bknmCP [ed. note: You should read this]
• Interesting: Swipely’s Credit Card Purchase-Sharing Service Opens to the Public http://bit.ly/cFv5A2
• hmmm….I wonder if I can use this for business cards: Share and Track the Story of Any Object with Printable QR Codes http://bit.ly/dftSma
• Free agent Nation: Thousands of Workers are Standing By http://oreil.ly/aGxrMt
• Let’s see what happens today: Facebook’s Location Product Could Be A Bigger Attack On Google And Yelp Than On 4-square http://bit.ly/d0JVox
• Yahoo Eyes Women’s Social-Networking Site CafeMom for $100 Million http://bit.ly/9v8IGA
• I want one: RT T-Mobile G2 gets a teaser site, will be network’s first HSPA+ phone http://bit.ly/90bHUO

Also, this is a good idea about why you might want to market IT as a business. - http://bit.ly/bs0sa1

Have a good night.

We’ve done this over the last three years. The leasing model is fairly unique. We’re forcing the financial system and internal process, saying this equipment will go away every two years. That equipment for most companies is still really good, but for us we have to be able to deliver for the 90 million customers. We do more transactions than the New York Stock Exchange on our site.

Anyways, check out the interview. It’s worth the read.

How strongly do some bankers feel about cloud computing? “We will never buy another data center,” said Michael Harte, CIO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, in an April speech to the Committee for Economic Development in Australia.

“We will never buy another rack or server or storage device or network device again,” Harte continued. “I will never let any organization that I work for get locked into proprietary hardware or software again. I’ll never tell my teams in the business that it will be weeks to get them hardware provision. I’ll never pay up front for any infrastructure and certainly would never pay for any, or rent any, infrastructure that I would never use.”

You have no idea how happy that makes me. In my opinion, the biggest stumbling block for external cloud computing usage, is trusting cloud providers with your data. However, using a third party’s cloud isn’t much different from you hosting your own custom-built data center. Either way, it is still in another building housed by people you pay. The question is why should you really trust internal employees more than external service providers? It seems, at least according to the study referenced in the above article, that banks are finding ways to dissipate the fears to take advantage of the potential cost savings.

Also, someone should have taught that man about never saying never, but that is a story for another date and time.

via GigaOM Pro

This Cisco’s Live Snapshot, titled “Cloud Computing Adoption Surges Ahead,” has this wonderful quote in the very first paragraph:

According to a survey conducted during Cisco Live, 71 percent of organizations have implemented some form of cloud computing, despite an unclear understanding as to the actual definition of the technology.

That’s hysterical. If you are unclear as to what the definition of cloud computing is, how can you say you’ve implemented some form of it? I tried to find an analogy that would work to make it even funnier, but being funny is hard work and apparently I forgot to take my funny pills this morning. So no soup for you. Anyways, I think the reason behind this leap-o-logic is that “cloud” is a great word. Normally when it comes to technology when you explain something you sound ridiculous to the non-techy. You say something like:

“You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. In addition, Amazon RDS allows you to easily deploy your database instance across multiple Availability Zones to achieve enhanced availability and reliability for critical production deployments.”

and your friend stares at you, shakes her head, and goes and grabs a beer leaving you alone with your thoughts. “Cloud computing” on the other hand is easy to understand. The word cloud invokes an image that everyone is already familiar with and can easily remember. “I remember one time…in kindergarten…I saw a cloud that looked like an elephant. It had the trunk and everything!” The fact that you could be talking about anything from infrastructure as a service (IaaS), to platform as a service (Paas), to Hypervisor solutions using virtualization, to a high performance computing solution doesn’t matter. The fact that it could be public or private or whether it is simply just a delivery model is meaningless.  Because at the end of the day part of the brain still registers clouds like a 6-year-old. “Clouds are shaped like dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are AWESOME.”

As a result, when you talk about cloud computing the conversation goes, “Hey, it’s a cloud. I get it. What do you think I am, an idiot? Well…if I’m an idiot, then you are a fool for working with an idiot, and I’ll be damned if I give my money to a fool. Good day sir.” That may have been a slight exaggeration of a real world conversation, but the point remains. Everyone thinks they know what cloud computing is, when in reality they do not, and it is probably only because of the word “cloud” itself. At some point I have to write a one-pager for work on the topic, and I’ll post an excerpt here when I’m done, but I thought it would be fun to point out why the English language may be the cause of the above discrepancies in the first place.