Independence with clouds is the way to innovation

There was a time in the not so distant past when employees at major companies needed to schedule time to use IT resources.  The mainframes which could run specialized applications would run ’jobs’ late in the evening and return results the next day.  While I was not around in the working force in those technology days I have to wonder if the sense of ingenuity and creativity was stifled by this situation.  Can you just imagine a junior person speaking up in a meeting and wanting to try something and being shot doing by management since with scarce resources they may only have time or funds to run one job that night; the safe choice or the experimental one.  Thankfully we have moved beyond this and placed applications and computing power into the hands of users in the form of personal computer.  How many innovations have come from people who think a little differently working in their garage or after hours in the office?

But we are slowly falling back into the days of centralized controlling IT.  With the wondrous innovations of web based services, applications are moving more centralized again.  No longer can I install an application on my computer, now they need to be put into some various data center.  Anyone who works at a decent size company knows that getting an application fully approved and included into a corporate data center needs more than a cup of coffee and a smile, not to mention a whole lot of time.  And yet there is this new thing called the cloud.  With absolutely no permission I could load an application into the cloud and use it as much or as little as I need.  As long as the payments are made, IT is none the wiser.  The New York Times had digitized their entire library of almost 150 years worth of past new stories, but having used the latest technology of the day they were all of a format unusable for search or web browsing.  While the company debated what to do and scoped out a project for tens of thousands of dollars, a single junior IT member booked some space on Amazon’s cloud, and in 2 days had parsed all the files to an open standard using just a few lines of code he wrote himself.  Total cost?  36 hours of Amazon computing cloud.  This is the innovation that helps a society thrive.  Is there any downside?

In the previous example the data that was sent to Amazon was simply old news stories, but what if it was a company’s entire customer database?  There is a concern of proprietary or identity information being released outside the locked doors of a data center.  With clouds this is all too easy.  Just look at recent politicians who chose to use a cloud email platform as compared to their government emails.  It can be for mischievous reasons such as oversight and public records or ever more simply; cloud emails have vastly larger space allowances than almost any government or corporate email box.  I have personally had coworkers send me large ppt files to my gmail account rather than my corporate account when on vacation for fear it would overwhelm my corporate email. 

So what is the moral?  Most management classes teach leaders to empower their employees with freedom to be creative and try things differently than the acceptable practices; this is what leads to innovation.  Yet one needs to be safe about this.  Jake Sorofman blogged about this is CIO magazine how cloud computing needs to be embraced with oversight, but embraced all the same.  Regardless of the choice by IT, Innovation only comes when there is room to try.

Posted by Matthew Stein at 07:41AM PST