Cloudy Computing

Every cloud has a silver lining. Combine it with a smart marketing blitzkrieg and corporate budgets you only see a silver cloud.

It’s not silver but green bucks people are after. Aren't they? Even Gartner has an "IT Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies" which basically means that innovative solutions like Cloud Computing go through an unavoidable cycle of hype before masses truly understand their worth. There are many such examples in our short but glorious history to name a few dot com era and webservices are top of the recall.

It is not that such innovative solutions (dot com and webservices included) do not have much value. Only these ideas did not have much application (and thus appreciation) at the time when these were hyped to be so. Today we have uncountable solutions people had dreamt of during the dot com burst; webservices have truly enabled SOA and enabled distributed solutions to integrate (who remembers EDI and other integration ideas?). But webservices did not result into a major infrastructure by itself as was prophesied some time back (public UDDI directories are limited to some trivial services).

Public cloud computing, in my belief, has similar fate in store.

There are many things going for Cloud. Some of these are:

Managing bottom lines: ever decreasing overheads is an everyday dream of CFO's and people managing bottom lines. This unquenchable thrust will definitely fuel any idea which can promise to reduce the overheads and operating costs for corporates. But this is only till the time when somebody either brings a better idea or proves that it’s not safe for business.

Managing Complexities (Abstraction?): Abstraction runs as the common thread in most our services and solutions. A cloud completely hides the complexities of infrastructure and technology changes from the end users and owners. Well done!
Availability: 24/7 availability of the infrastructure and services would be a must have feature.

Some of the following may stop an all-out embracing of Public Clouds:

Security: Not only at cloud level but also at source code level will be a mandatory aspect. With more valuable data moving into clouds it will be a prime target for hackers and phishing community. Mare thought is jittery for anyone and would be so for the corporates.

Conflict of interests: It’s a complex world out there. One of the investors of cloud provider could on board of your competitor. Though it could be rare but it still is a probability.

Reduced costs: Over a period of time hardware costs have tendency to head south. This along with off shoring to cheaper destinations will rob public clouds of cost advantages.

Market size: There are already some magical numbers pertaining to market size for public clouds but these needs to be evaluated and at best taken with a pinch of salt. As natural and democratic phenomena ideas/solutions with smaller market size receive small part of R&D spends and this in turn scuttles the innovation.

Private clouds on the other hands would be more acceptable by the corporates who make bigger chunk of the global IT spend. Thus we will have clouds but best ROI would be achieved by the bigger players within their enterprises just like web services. This would take away the “utility” tag from clouds and Infrastructure as a service (IAAS).

Delivering Value

Delivery Management is natural extension of project and engagement management. If Project Management, besides having prime objective of Risk mitigation, focuses on delivering as per the specifications what should Delivery focus on?
“Delivering value” should fit the bill perhaps?
All of us are naturally, or by imposed processes, oriented towards achieving the glory of on-time, within-cost and quality deliveries for our customers (internal or external). Numerous improvements (technical, tools, processes and most importantly human intelligence) over the past decade have been intended not only towards making better software solutions but also to achieve the feat of absolute deliveries.
Our endeavors to achieve absolute deliveries are impacted, besides our abilities, by numerous stated (and obvious) and unstated (not so obvious) requirements. Fulfillment of the unstated ones usually creates a sticky and fan customer base. Most of these unstated requirements usually translate to the value which customer expects from the solution which we deliver. It is the perceived value which customers expect from the solution. However it’s, probably, very difficult to understand the value of something we cannot hold, feel or touch (at least for most of us) and considering its "virtual" nature, Software fits the bill perfectly.
Just like beauty, "value" also lies with the beholder and the beholders of the "value" of the software solution are stakeholders. Aren't they? To begin with the end users (I mean the real end users) who would use the software solutions are the true evaluators of the value of the system (aka tool, product, solution etc). Then come the team members who are responsible for the upkeep of the system (system maintenance) followed by the Big Brother who pays for the system. There could be some additional parties like statutory and environmental bodies who could become stakeholders for specific type of systems.
On the other side of we have US, the IT solution & services organizations, bestowed with the magical skills to build software for the people at the other side. We have been at it long enough to realize the importance of delivering as per the customer specified requirements. With the rich experience we have evolved and identified the specialized groups like Business Analysts, Usability Engineers, Designers, Architects and Quality Specialists besides the strong developer community entrusted with tasks of creating the solutions. Not to mention numerous other processes and specialized tools to meet the end.
However, when all is said and delivered, it is the delivery team and the ultimate owner (The Delivery Head/Director?) who should stand tall and ask either “Is this what end-users wanted?” or “Does it add any substantial value to what end-user wanted?” What do you ask often?
The difference in both the questions is nominal but value is phenomenal! The difference could be a satisfied customer or a fan customer. Which one would you like to have?
Having noted that, managing deliveries is no easy task!
Who can find time from managing bottom-lines, optimizing costs, utilization, billing, processes improvements, PMO initiatives etc to look at something which is only perceived by customers? We do tend to deliver as per the customer specifications most of the time, don’t we? Why should customer expect something beyond what he has paid for? Don’t we have enough issues of our own like attrition, defects, new technologies etc to worry about something which is only in customers head?
While all of the above is also true, it would pay huge dividends if look at some other businesses which have evolved (and also improved) with strong customer-perception-focus. In more than one aspect our services are not very different from boutique establishments (restaurants, saloons etc) where the focus is on “customization for individuals need”. Most of such “boutique” businesses have been extremely successful in more than satisfying their customers (Just recollect the time when you have walked out of your favorite saloon or shop with utmost satisfaction of having realized more than full value for your money!). Though our challenges are higher with numerous end-users to satisfy for each account we also have many specialized roles to address the issue.
We also have an ally in Innovation!
Innovation, in its varied forms, is an extremely useful (valuable?) initiative which has huge potential in delivering the value, however most of such initiatives are oriented towards managing and optimizing productivity and internal costs. Besides helping IT services organizations become more proficient internally innovations in the end-solutions have been limited to the technical achievements like frameworks (including J2EE, .NET, Struts etc), WEB 2.0, processes etc. Agile methodologies have been more successful in delivering a value to the end users reason for it being the avid involvement of end-user in the development of the solutions.
However, innovation, just like value, has its own challenges. Paramount of these challenges being ever increasing expectations of users. We quickly got used to Windows interface and mobile phones. It took an iPhone to satiate our desires for a considerable longer period of time. But this also will not last long as user community looks forward to next set of innovative solutions. Call it market dynamics or whatever, we are part of it. The problem and the solution as well.
Difficult as it may be in the end “value” is only perceived thus it’s befitting that skills of listening and empathy are judicially used in account and delivery management.
Only with empathy and understanding of the true desires of the end user (in many cases WE ourselves are THE end users) we will be able to answer some the key questions. Once we have answered these questions we will have large fan-customer-base who would, as they say, eat out of our hands.

Happy delivering!