Recently I attended boxworks in San Francisco. My goal was to learn about what box will deliver for large, regulated organizations, and how these firms and others are using box and other cloud solutions today.
I would like to say I found a silver bullet for document management. I didn’t. But what I did discover is that there is a developing ecosystem that will enable organizations to move in the direction of cloud or “off prem” solutions much more cleanly than I anticipated. It’s clear that in the cloud world, there is a fabric where firms like Jive, SalesForce.com, and box.net are working together to develop solutions for their respective pieces of the enterprise solution puzzle, do what they do well, and let others help evolve the ecosystem.
Nirvana, right?
Maybe not Nirvana; remember, the theme here is Third Eye Blind, so it is still not 100 percent clear “how’s it gonna be” with the cloud.
A change is coming, however. As these new providers continue to refine their offerings, large software deployments will begin to be displaced. Spending 6 months to internally deploy a platform and infrastructure becomes silly; yes, you heard me, I said silly — when you can buy, configure, and provision a cloud solution in days or even hours.
This is huge. Stop and think about it. No, stop reading, and think about what that means for your organization.
(Okay, back to this note.)
Another change that crystallized for me comes in the makeup of your internal support organization. Why do you hire employees to code software? Are you a software company? We continue to hear how organizations want IT to be their partner; well, it’s hard when one individual is focused on the business solution and one individual is focused on infrastructure and development. I now see the IT of the future looking a lot like a business user who:
1) Understands the departmental use case,
2) Is tech-savvy enough to configure an admin page,
3) Can manage the app store, and
4) Can be a value-add to actual business activity when needed.
Not everyone is ready for change. Organizations still argue about co-mingled data, off-premise, and security. I get it; I do. But think about the business value of starting to shed the management of non-proprietary information to outside of your firewall. Allow your users to live the “semi-charmed kind of life,” be free, see where they can extend the value of their information. Eventually you will feel as safe about the cloud as you did about email, local area networks, and wireless devices.
Change is coming; don’t wait too long. Shared drives and collaborative communications are a great place to start.