Much ballyhoo has greeted the news that IT departments have been moving their enterprise applications to the public cloud providers like Amazon's AWS, or Microsoft's Azure. It's taken a huge change in culture to allow in house IT professionals to get to the point where they are prepared to offload this: in a sector where the powers of logical analysis are so highly prized, the inertia surrounding cloud adoption has been surprisingly emotional, full of concerns about trust (and losing their jobs). The logic, of course, has been compelling for many years: cost savings are huge, the "spin up" time ridiculously shorter, and the surge capacity significantly greater. So, now that this shift is finally happening, are we done?
Sadly, no. To understand why not, it's necessary to go back to first principles, to explore why we have technology in the first place. Unfortunately for those, like me, that love tech for its own sake, it's only an enabler: it's there to deliver a service, that of finding out. It allows people (and other systems) to find stuff out: a client address, a supplier invoice, an operational metric. Once you understand that, you stop seeing IT systems as assets and as an end in itself, and start thinking in terms of outcomes, what you need the technology to do.
And that has some surprising conclusions. The first is a realisation that your desired outcomes are no different from all other firms': you need to find out the same sort of stuff. The next realisation is that there is significant overlap in the information needs of each department of your business: in the same way that your firm's information needs are the same as other firms', so they are internally. These conclusions, in turn, drive two sets of actions. The first is to understand that technology procurement should be driven by the nature of information service that is desired, not by department. Many other groups need information about clients for instance, not just the sales team. The second is to understand that, as your outcomes are the same as other firms', then it is logical to rent the same services that everyone else is using, not putting the old bespoke applications on cloud servers. It's not the tools that mark out a great craftsman, it's what they do with them. Leonardo da Vinci was not famous for his paintbrush.
That brings us back to the point. The Damascene conversion to the use of cloud servers for old, bespoke applications is really only putting lipstick on a pig, akin to plonking a horse saddle in a car. The cloud is really primarily a governance revolution, enabling a radically better way of managing information. Changing where the server resides is really only halfway there, if that.