We have to move to the cloud. – Business climate demands it.  One of my key takeaways from a great presentation by Geoffrey Moore at Cloud Connect Conference yesterday. (3/15/20010). Forget cost reductions, forget technical discussions, moving to clouds will happen because the rise of business networks requires we offload non critical parts of the business.  Today we are maintaining the current, tomorrow we will move to the clouds.

Geoffrey, the managing Director of TCG Advisors & Venture Partner, Mohr, is most well known for his bestselling books.  As always, when he presents, there was standing room only.   His compelling story for clouds had three key points: Reality requires companies to interact globally. The strength of a company lies in the ability of middle management to expedite, i.e. get things done.  The database, or the system of record is still required, but is no longer the center of the strategy

Reality requires companies to interact globally. Unless you have been asleep for the past ten years, we all know this.  The presentation had a nice stair stepper diagram that showed the steps in the following order: extend the market, outsource, innovate the network, compete as a network.  Many companies today most companies have accomplished the first two steps.  For instance they might have a global supply chain or sell internationally.  They may also have outsourced production or portion of their software development.  Some have even taken step three, where they have innovative networks.  But the goal is to compete in real time, with total transparency, and accurate information.

The strength of a company lies in the ability of middle management to expedite, i.e. get things done. How many times have you been asked for information and you are looking for the key person to provide it?  Or you are madly searching through software to find the most up-to-date number.  Or you are in a meeting and have to say, I don’t have the information and will have to get back to you?  All of us can relate!

I could not agree more!  No pun intended.  We need to be able to compete in a global environment.  Today, IT’s budgets can only spend about 6% on new software.  They are too busy taking care of the existing software and paying for the hardware.  If we want them to innovate – work on the core parts of the business that provide the IP for the company, we need to move the other parts of the IT business to the people who are experts at that portion of the business.  It is simply the next step, just similar to when we moved from writing our own HR systems, ERP system, even our own databases.  Today it may be partly cloudy, but the cloudy days are coming!