Cloud Computing is NOT a Strategy

Read a Busi­ness Week arti­cle this morn­ing in which Jack Welch elab­o­rated on a recent inter­view he did with FT dis­cussing share­holder value. When asked what he thought of “share­holder value as a strat­egy,” he replied “[it’s] a dumb idea, share­holder value is an out­come — not a strategy.”

I put a cou­ple of, IMHO, insight­ful tweets today about cloud com­put­ing. Things that popped into my head as I was prepar­ing for the Cloud Com­put­ing Expo at which I’ll be speaking.

One tweet in par­tic­u­lar caught some people’s attention.

“Mov­ing to the cloud will force IT to be about inte­gra­tion and appli­ca­tion deliv­ery, instead of ‘infra­struc­ture babysit­ting,’ as it is today”

To which Brenda Michel­son responded “How about inte­gra­tion & “busi­ness capa­bil­ity delivery”?

Exactly! In fact, I was speak­ing from a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive, and Brenda clar­i­fied ele­vat­ing the mes­sage to a more mean­ing­ful level. One that non-bitheads could understand.

As I was jump­ing through my iPhone to respond to her, Jack’s “share­holder value is not a strat­egy” state­ment came into my head. And, I can’t help but relate to it. Cloud com­put­ing is not a strat­egy, it’s an input. The strat­egy is to more closely tie IT results to align with “Busi­ness Capa­bil­ity Delivery.”

Thank you Brenda.