before<\/a>, the control issue is less real than people imagine. \u00a0I think the same holds true for the SLA’s Mr. Blanchette refers to. \u00a0Perhaps his company is different, but I have watched SLA’s (which is most companies mean Service Level Acceptance – that is the level the customer is forced to accept – as opposed to an actual agreement) gamed by a variety of techniques, such that outages and down time is harder to quantify. \u00a0I have one Cloud vendor where I can get a pretty talented support person on line within seconds for my apps and servers. \u00a0Even when I worked for a large company, that was absolutely never the case unless I was a personal friend of the individual I needed to talk to. \u00a0Frequently, the problems that the IT and business people further down in the trenches experience with their infrastructure and app support teams, are shielded from the senior management and CIO until they become really severe. \u00a0Even a value proposition that appears only marginally better on paper may reflect a significantly better reality. \u00a0The question is, how would you know? \u00a0The only real way, of course, is to ensure that you really understand your environment and the way it works for people. \u00a0How to do that, of course, is the subject of a great number of management classes and programs, so I’ll leave that for another time.<\/p>\n One thing I did like from the summit was the understanding on the part of the CIO’s that people obtain Cloud services on their own, independent of IT, because most corporate IT organizations are not responsive enough. \u00a0I just hope that this wasn’t a recent revelation. \u00a0The inability of most IT organizations to be responsive is very old news. \u00a0It is why, back in the early 90’s that Filemaker and 4D (and later Access and Excel) became the bane of IT’s existence. \u00a0Since IT couldn’t provide any sort of rapid application delivery to address emerging needs, people found tools that allowed them to go it on their own. \u00a0Of course, these tools were often used to create poorly engineered databases, but they worked, and business units grew to depend on them. \u00a0At some point, the original designer left, or they needed the application to support more people, and they would hand over the dysfunctional system to IT to manage. \u00a0The situation hasn’t changed. \u00a0We live in a world where some large organizations didn’t finish moving to Windows XP until over year after it left mainstream support and a mere 4 years before End of Life. \u00a0That is the reality of corporate IT. \u00a0I have only seen glimmers of organizational transformation that leads me to think that this might change at some point. \u00a0Until it does, the only thing that IT can really do is to take the lead into the Cloud, and be supportive of businesses seeking solutions there. \u00a0I have one user who needs a moderately expensive tool, that is available in the Cloud. \u00a0I could tell her to wait at least a year, until I have bandwidth to attempt to bring such a solution in house (assuming I can find the dollars necessary to support the infrastructure costs), or I can let her look at systems as a customer, with my presence only as a second opinion and to verify that these systems will fit into our overall strategy. \u00a0The former means she is operating with a significant handicap for at least a year, the latter that we are able to achieve more in less time. \u00a0Which do you think is the best approach?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every time a significant shift in information technology appears, there is a period of extremes in response to it, where one minute everyone is really excited about the option and the next, an extreme pessimism sets in. \u00a0Cloud computing appears to be going through the same thing. \u00a0In a post from this morning’s CIO Journal, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infosynergetics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"IMG](\"http:\/\/lh5.ggpht.com\/-KDrSVv7xQUI\/UqNoNQoArcI\/AAAAAAAAAPg\/pIscVulEsbQ\/IMG_1487.jpg?imgmax=800\" "\\"IMG_1487.jpg\\"")
<\/p>\n