Cloud Computing & Political Correctness

I woke this morning to read David Linthicum's article "How to kill the cloud: Claim it's about job loss," originally published at InfoWorld.com.

Here is my initial thought: are you kidding me ? David's theory is that the adoption of Cloud Computing would be far more "acceptable" (aka politically correct) if we didn't have executives like Unisys's Richard Marcello saying: "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization."

To be fair, I think David is a really brite guy and he correctly observes that technology innovation often sets forth unrealistic expectations when it comes to realizing cost reductions and other benefits. But to read this: "The message here is that the cloud computing industry needs to think a bit about what it's saying in the promotion of cloud computing. Some of the "cloud computing experts" are sending wrong and inaccurate messages. In other words, they're not helping." What are they not helping ? Don't you believe that enhancing the quality of systems and reducing the expense of deploying them for the benefit of customers isn't at the core of innovation ? Isn't that what its all about ? For those who don't think so I suggest a view of Danny Devito's Larry the liquidator speech from the movie Other People's Money below. Amen, you just heard a prayer - the prayer for the "dead".

Bottom line is significant segments of IT, along with players in a variety of industries, are in peril because their value paradigms are erroding, no longer as relevant to the market. Its only a matter of time until a combination of forces including globalism, technology advancements and mega cultural shifts turn over their proverbial apple carts. David do you honestly believe that the "press" people get around the "truth" (being that reengineering significant aspects of business models via cloud computing will eliminate vast segments of the job market and redeploy them abroad) will stop this revolution ? That's analogous to what GM thought ten years ago about its industry. You get the idea. Perhaps it would help advance our industry to be more transparent about obsolesence, change, and continuing to get an increasing share of a shrinking market. Think about the buggy whip example Larry cites in his speech.

Social Media - We're Just Getting Started

Gentry Underwood focuses on social media and collaborative software at IDEO. He works both internally and with the firm's clients to design and build software people will actually use.  Check out his recent post: Social Software, The Other Design for Social Impact. Gentry's post includes the following exerpt:

It isn't difficult to see where most social software falls short: many tools have pleasant, user-friendly interfaces and take advantage of well-designed physical devices (i.e., they're easy to use from a human-computer-interaction perspective). But it's in the sociological and anthropological arenas where they run into trouble: most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction.

The bottom line, which Underwood intelligently shares, is that we are in the infancy of social software and new methods of designing these tools will lead to more powerful applications of their capabilities. Join Gentry and continue the discussion at http://socialsoftware.org. In the meantime watch this hillarious satirized look at Facebook by the British improv troupe Idiots of Ants  that pushes the social behaviors of Facebook to the extreme.

Google's Chief on the Web's Future

Gartner's recent 2009 Symposium provided another opportunity for IT leaders to share views regarding the future. Google's chief Eric Schmidt explored his thinking on key internet trends; among them real time search, the dominance of Chinese language content, the ten fold increase in computing power and the continued shift to video content - all forecasted to dominate the next five years of the Internet's evolution.

Gartner is a respected research firm and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed at business leaders. An excerpted 6 minutes highlights points of interest to anyone impacted by the web.

For an interesting review of Schmidt's contemplation of these points read Kirkpatrick's article and watch the brief video. It will be an exciting next five years indeed.

Web 2.0 and the Mobile Internet

The Web 2.0 summit just wrapped up in SFCA this past week. There are some noteworthy observations and content on their web site and in particular Mary Meeker's annual overview of Internet trends . Take an moment to review her indepth presentaiton below. A huge surge in mobile access is about to, yet again, revolutionize businesses and the adoption of new technologies using cloud infrastructure and location centric applications will become another key influencer of shareholder value and produce and service niche differentiation. Among the conferences many revleaing presenters Mary put forth a revealing observations that platforms which combine social networking with mobility will drive "unprecedented change in communications + commerce." As Richard MacManus points out, that statement seems a little hyperbolic, but we have undeniably seen an uptick in usage this year of companies like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite. Later in the presentation, Meeker predicted that Facebook will be a major player in this market in the near future.
Hold onto your hats.

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit

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Innovation - It's Up To Us To Remove The Barriers To Progress

C.K. Prahalad, author of The New Age of Innovation, Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks, among other books, makes a very important observation in a recent interview. He says, " the competitive landscape is morphing...creating a new way of thinking. Current innovation literature is based largely on the legacy of the industrial age." In other words many leaders have not seen the opportunity of new innovation because they continue to define opportunity via vanished industrial paradigms. C.K. is right. In my experience most leadership creates the barriers to progress because they are too rooted in the past and therefore leaders can't see or understand the foundations of the future. The good news is that CK and his book addresses this and other issues to lay a foundation for how organization can change to focus on new solutions that indeed create value aligned with the modality of the new world.

His "one consumer at a time" by delivering personalized experience or  as he terms it "N=1"; and his "R=G" concept, wherein an orchestration of resources from a wide variety of people and organizations are used to deliver value, are key concepts to adopt for creating value in our new world.

CK notes two shifts necessary to grasp the innovation oportunity. The first is the way we look at the world. Leadership must accept it is going to change. You have to have a point of view about the future when evaluating the present. You cannot anchor yourself in the past. The second needed shift is  that leaders must come to terms with the dominant logic they have relied upon. to rid themselves of past logic in order to embrace the new.

Watch CK's Businessweek interviews below. These are insightful and helpful in understanding more about how businesses can adopt N=1 and R=G concepts to progress rapidly and effectively through innovation.