Almost all lists of heterogeneous responses that result from compilations or polls have the built-in interest factor of making you compare what you would have said to what others have said. But while your own answers to being polled seem either intuitively correct or logically defensible, that still only goes so far in addressing the bigger question of why certain things make the  list when others do not. That is, why do the "top" tens or only "eight" keys wind up together on the same list?

One very interesting explanation is that the answers are all related to each other in a big picture, but the respondents didn't all have the same sensitivity to the different parts of the picture so they gave answers about different parts.

Stephen Elliott's article has the interesting overall effect of pointing at a group of things that cross the worlds of administrators, managers and executives. For managers, it suggests that they have to ask themselves things like "is this efficiency valuable, or just cheaper?" or "how much of this self-service is really self-help?" or "when we said 'deliver', should we instead have said 'supply', 'distribute', or 'operate'?"

From a different direction, executives would be noting that they don't want to automate integrations; executives want integrations 'to be automated'; and they don't want to reduce resources either, but instead they want better outcomes from relying on them.

And so on. There may be a punchline here that is mainly about re-organizing. For example, it is commonplace to assume that execs think about value, managers think about performance, and administrators think about resources. But in reality, it is necessary that what an executive considers to be a "resource" for outcomes and prefab integration is under appropriate resource management; and what managers consider to be valuable  for provision is under appropriate value management, and so on. This broader aligning and coordinating of appropriate perspectives is most likely what will predetermine whether the business can use the cloud effectively or not -- so it might need to precede notions of what makes a "deployment" successful.

Posted by: Malcolm Ryder | May 12, 2010 5:45 PM