Cloud

Have you Hired Snowden?

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I have had a LOT of discussions with people over the past year about Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the impact on cloud adoption. My general response is that it would likely slow US adoption of the cloud by a few months and outside the US by a couple of years.

Well, it has be six months since this all started and I was starting to wonder about how this was panning out. Then Computerworld kindly published a piece stating that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) were sticking with the cloud despite the NSA.

While 20 CIOs are in no way a fair sample size, even if they are geographically dispersed, they did raise several excellent points.

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With the Power of the Cloud Comes Great Responsibility

imageThere are a lot of cloud applications that people are bringing into the enterprise. While many problems are being addressed, this works best when this occurs with IT’s knowledge. My general opinion is that if IT doesn’t have the resources to implement a new technology in a timely fashion, then they should at work with the end-users to make sure a system is picked that will best fit with the future enterprise architecture.

Of course, there will always be people that will choose to adopt other applications without working with or informing IT. The newest cloud applications driving the Consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend make this very easy.

Of course, as they say in the comics, With great power comes great responsibility.

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Cloud May be Easier but Do Your Homework

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imageAt this point, just about everyone acknowledges that the simplified, cloud-based Content solutions like Box and Syncplicity are here to stay. There is a place for them in the Enterprise world and that place will grow as their capabilities grow.

What I’ve been hearing and seeing is a repeat of what I’d like to call the SharePoint Experience. People would just role SharePoint out because it was easy and expect everything to work. As we all now know, that wasn’t always the case.

Content Management, when done in a way to do more than just replace a file share, requires planning. It requires Change Management aspects to be considered. The impact to the business processes needs to be planned. Old content has to be migrated.

imageWhen SharePoint hit it big, this didn’t happen. Technicians just implemented it without considering the need to understand Content Management. Now, it is a different story.

As these new offerings are purchased and deployed, I’m seeing a lot of the same things. Instead of IT, the business users are leading the efforts. Sure, they don’t need to create an architecture or determine what customizations are needed, but they still need to plan.

  • How are we organizing content? Are we going to rely on tagging? Do we need to establish a simple Taxonomy?
  • What are we going to do about existing Content? Do we migrate or leave it as is? Are we bringing any structures from the old system over?
  • How do we integrate our business processes?
  • Speaking of integration, what about our other business systems?
  • How are we providing documentation, training, and support to our users?

These are common issues in Content Management and with a cloud-based system they may be simpler questions to answer.

The key to answering these questions is knowing that they need to be asked before the project starts.

Checklists of things to do aren’t going away, they are just getting shorter. They are becoming simplified but still require knowledgeable Information Professionals to lead the effort.

The goal of these cloud-based Content Management solutions is to take the simplicity of file sharing and add the functionality of Content Management. We all need to make sure that the result of this combination is the best of both worlds and not the worst.