Pssst. The ‘Cloud’ matters. Especially if you’re not in IT.

Earlier this month, I sat down with my friend and colleague Tony
Safoian, President & CEO of SADA Systems, Inc., to talk about the
‘Cloud’ and its strategic implications outside of the IT world. Listen
up. If your business doesn’t have a cloud strategy yet, you better get
one soon.

The ‘Cloud’ is the hottest topic in IT circles, but it’s non-IT
folks who have the biggest reason to get excited about it. Why? Because
the ‘Cloud’ marks a slow – and most likely, welcome – exit from needing
to have people (IT folks) on sight to manage servers, organize
databases, setup workgroups, police email storage sizes, and just about
everything else. The reason the Cloud is so exciting is that little to
no expertise in information technology is required to run a business
anymore and the expenses usually associated with keeping the technical
infrastructure of the business up and running are getting close to
zero. However . . . while the Cloud will level the playing field when
it comes to IT infrastructure, it will at the same time create a new
playing field that will differentiate successful companies from
unsuccessful ones, and that is the field of Information Utilization. Info-utility will be the new differentiator.

Why is the Cloud so compelling? According to
Safoian, “anyone starting a company today can have the best in class
email, collaboration, document sharing, and file server technology for
about $5-$10 a month without having to spend any money on licenses, on
software, on hardware, or on people to manage these things. It’s a
tremendous value proposition.” All of this is a result of the economies
of scale that the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others bring to
the table. And here’s where things get interesting. Younger companies
could very well have an edge over their older competitors because they
don’t have the shackles of their legacy systems and legacy ways.

So what do you do with your IT department? In
short, transform it. The real value in IT is no longer in doing backups
and anti-virus checks, but in working with employees and teams to
maximize the way information is used to be as efficient and effective
as possible. The focus needs to shift from making sure that the
technology works, to making sure that the application of the tools are
working for the people in the organization. It’s a shift to the human
element of how things get done, and it enables the former IT department
(now the Info-Utility department) to concentrate on business process
functions.

What should a CEO be asking her CTO? According to Safoian, the questions are:

• How much are we spending on IT?
• What value are we getting for that expense?
• What is the skill-set of the people in the IT department?
• Are they plumbers or business process consultants?

And here’s the big one . . .

• Do we have the tools sufficient to be competitive with a startup
  that has no legacy costs, very few current IT costs, and whose teams
  can work and collaborate from anywhere?

So, the question leaders should be asking now is,‘Do we have a bunch of people supporting our technology or is the technology supporting our people?’ If you’ve got the former, change the game because info-utility will soon be the new playing field.

If you missed the last newsletter on ‘The Reason Your Big New Idea Will Fail,’ you can still find it here.

Tony
Safoian is President and CEO of SADA Systems, Inc. He’s an operations
and marketing fanatic who believes that Information Technology can
empower organizations and the community. “I believe the future is
computing power delivered like electricity, and that information
technology is much more about people than things.” More on his company
can be found here.