By Thornton May, Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Dennis Flanagan, long-time editor of Scientific American, tells of once meeting the famous New Yorker movie critic, Pauline Kael. After introducing themselves, Ms. Kael admitted to Flanagan that she knew “absolutely nothing” about science. Flanagan responded: “Whatever became of the idea that an educated person is supposed to know a little something about everything?" 

This bygone tale of fourth-estate squabbling reminds me how much the world has changed. Today, every executive not only needs to know “a little something” about information technology – he or she needs to play an energetic and informed role in making sure that full value is extracted from the some $3.7 billion dollars we spend annually for information technology.

There are four disruptive technologies [frequently referred to as the S.M.A.C. stack] which are materially re-arranging the realm of what is possible today:

• Social
• Mobile
• Analytics [Big Data]
• Cloud

The recently concluded “for Geeks only” Networld Interop trade show featured an array of single-shingle consultants trying to out-plagiarize each other in their use of vendor sales material and misapply the frameworks/findings of reputable subscription research firms such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC. The program revealed the shockingly value-challenged current state of thinking [or lack thereof] regarding the cluster of technologies, techniques and tactics collectively known as “cloud computing.”

Cloud computing materially expands the production possibility frontier [economic-speak for “it lets us do more stuff”]. This expanded capability to “do more stuff” needs to be understood and interrogated by senior executives. Cloud computing should not be a “black box”, just something that “IT does.” Cloud computing badly needs senior management attention.

Getting Cloud Computing out of its “Narrative Ghetto”
Say “cloud computing” in most gatherings of C-Suiters [including CIOs]. You probably will evoke a gag-reflex and end up standing alone in a corner. The conventional wisdom is that real executives don’t waste their time talking about cloud computing. How did a potentially game-changing technology-enabled strategic opportunity lock itself in such a narrative ghetto?

James Burke, the very British star of the Connections series by PBS [1978-UK/1979-US] frequently quipped, “…and that brings us to a guy named Descartes, on whom I blame everything.” Descartes had nothing to do with our current state of cloud affairs. I blame the sad state of cloud computing discourse on the vendors, the journalists and the analysts.

There is no shortage of signal regarding cloud computing. In the 2009-2010 time period just about every major trade rag [e.g., CIO Magazine, Information Week], mainstream business journal [e.g., Barron’s, Forbes, BusinessWeek] and every vertical market media property [e.g., National Mortgage News] ran repeated cover stories about how cloud computing was going to change everything. There are magazines solely devoted to cloud computing. And yet – even with all this activity – people, particularly non-IT senior executives, remain on the conversational sidelines.

Historians of journalism will look back at the cloud phenomena and label it a low point in the evolution of meaning making. The narrative around cloud computing can best be described as “gibberish. “

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison opined that cloud computing, "is the future of all computing, but more impressively, it is the present of all computing and the past of all computing...Everything is cloud computing." It is true that in the years since 2010, just about every product emerging from just about every vendor has been “cloud-washed” [i.e., represented as being “cloud-centric” or “cloud-ready”]. The conclusion is that “cloud computing has lost most of its meaning…” A senior executive from a cloud computing vendor asked to summarize the state of the cloud computing market today admitted, “It’s just a big confusing mess.”

We have migrated from the denial stage of cloud computing, through the threatening stage of cloud computing [e.g., vendors chastising potential customers "IF YOU DON'T HAVE A 'CLOUD STORY,' you are TOAST!" and have come to rest somewhere between the “Boy, we are confused” and the realization that “we’re all cloud providers now.”

Leave the Sidelines: Engage, Fiercely So
It is time for senior management to re-engage with cloud computing. It is time to ask some adult questions.

1. Who in our orbit/ecosystem [inside and outside the enterprise] is smart about this cloud computing stuff? Talk to them.
2. What kind of “communities” is engaging around the cloud issue in your enterprise? What are they saying? What is the dominant “cloud” narrative floating around your enterprise today?
3. What kind of cloud experiments have you conducted so far? What has the organization learned?
4. How can we use cloud computing to create competitive separation?
5. How can we use cloud computing to neutralize product/service advantages of competitors?
6. How can we use cloud computing to improve customer experience?
7. How can we use cloud computing to optimize our cost structure?

The answers to the above questions certainly won’t come easy. They didn’t when enterprises started using mainframes. Ditto minicomputers. Ditto networked PCs. Ditto client/server platforms. Ditto the Internet. Ditto consumerized IT. And double ditto, as a radio pundit would say, cloud computing.

There are four must-know, new knows regarding cloud computing:

• Where are you?
• Where do you want to go? [i.e., what options have you analyzed – strategically]
• How do intend to get there? [i.e., what are your options – tactically?]
• How do you convince the enterprise to make the trip?

These are the questions we need to be asking and answering about cloud computing.