Comments on: Does Cloud Computing Kill Intimacy?

By: Cloud & Customer Intimacy « My Scratchpad for IT

Cloud & Customer Intimacy « My Scratchpad for IT — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:58:34 +0000

[...] recently i came across a blog post by thomas bittman on the subject of customer intimacy ( http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2009/03/05/does-cloud-computing-kill-intimacy/). it is a good post that talks about how cloud might change the need for customer -IT [...]

By: Chris Bird

Chris Bird — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:01:45 +0000

I think that we are in danger of confusing things. I want as much intimacy with my IT provider as I do with the power company. They need to deliver the service that is promised at the price promised – no excuses. That’s the T part of IT. The Technology layer.

It isn’t that the business needs to align with IT, it is that there needs to be a way of expressing the business in terms that can be implemented in effective systems. Whether they involve T or not isn’t that important. It is the value of what can be delivered that is important. The platform (the T of IT) is uninteresting.

By: Tom Bittman

Tom Bittman — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:57:09 +0000

I think I agree with you completely. The one thing I would say is that it is important for enterprises to understand their internal service portfolio, to build a strategy for each, and some of those will shift heavily toward interface and independence (less intimacy – although as I stated, providers can still be somewhat responsive to changing market needs), while others should become more intimate and integrated with the business than they are today. Those latter services should eventually become nearly fused with business units and business processes, the gap between what is IT and what is business gets fuzzy. This is the opposite of the services that will be pushed toward private cloud services and eventually public cloud services, which will be held much more at arms length.

By: Tajeshwar Singh

Tajeshwar Singh — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:41:31 +0000

I think the issue of intimacy between IT and business should be treated independent of the fact whether cloud is there in the picture or not.

Even in cases where enterprise IT manufactures and delivers the “services” in the traditional manner, there are some services that will require lesser degree of intimacy with the business as compared to other services.

Services that can be considered as commodity services, for example business collaboration services like email, do not require a high degree of intimacy between the enterprise IT and business even now. These services can be easily packaged based on certain characteristics (like mailbox size etc), offered based on a subscription model and can be pretty much self serving. The users can go to an Intranet, select the right package of “Service” and subscribe to the same.

Services which are evolving, strategic, have the potential to impact the way an enterprise goes about conducting its business or impact the enterprise end customers require the enterprise IT teams to work closely with the business functions. Such services, hence, will fall in the category of services that require a higher degree of intimacy between IT and business.

However, services that are strategic today may not be so tomorrow depending on how the service is consumed and evolves just as the case with the email service. As the service undergoes the change, so will the degree of intimacy associated with it.

I don’t think the cloud computing model should change this phenomenon. The IT needs to ensure that they keep track of the demand and consumption pattern of the service and evolve the intimacy required accordingly.