Just as the same old Articles of Confederation wouldn't work for the newly independent United States, the same old IT governance principles won't work as your business continues to move to the cloud. Just make sure your cloud governance policies, like the Constitution, are designed to evolve.
Cloud vendors are re-learning the lessons of client-server support in the 1990s, and it's not a nice walk down memory lane. It's time for a cloud customer Bill of Rights.
The problem of a customer master database that holds the core of your company's customer data is as old as distributed software. The cloud adds some new twists to this issue and offers a new strategy for solving it.
This all happens in big cloud projects as well. There are many contributing factors to these bad outcomes-chief among them adversarial incentives, inappropriate metrics and lack of collaborative infrastructure-but those aren't the root cause.
When dealing with hardware and physical architecture, it's relatively obvious what the sequence of activities will be, where you are in the project and where the variances will be. As a result, a pre-determined schedule with Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) milestones is good for both the client and the suppliers.
If the competition is really hot, they might even be willing to lose money, with a low-ball "bid to win." In this case, the customer gets the lowest possible price and a contract that guarantees the completion of the project to the spec. During the project, nobody on the customer side will have to think. They can just measure. What's not to like?
In theory, it's best to clear all your database transactions as soon as you can, keeping the tables up to date so that you don't have to worry about data integrity or time-smear problems. It's not always that simple.
In Star Wars, Coruscant is an entire planet that's a city. And in the movie, traffic flows in three dimensions as everyone flies around - without any accidents. As it's science fiction, there aren't even any traffic jams.
The last five years have seen a revolution in mobile computing. The old-guard mobile phones and PC tablets have been put on the junk-heap, while devices running iOS and the Android OS have taken over the mobile world. With 4G, dual-core processors, huge amounts of RAM and gorgeous screens, you'd think that these devices would be perfect for running CRM apps. But that wave hasn't really happened yet.
In the decade since the Agile Manifesto, the movement has encouraged a number of best practices like test-driven development, user-centered design, iIterative development, clean code, refactoring, continuous integration, and-arguably-cloud computing.
Some companies are in the enviable position of having a sales backlog, and in many parts of the economy demand is starting to heat up. But prosperity has its own problems, including inventory shortages, guessing wrong on what the hot items will be, and excess work in progress that makes Wall Street cranky.
Customer support organizations were the earliest of adopters for CRM systems. Thanks to call center software and the need to drive cost reductions and faster service turn-around cycles, the customer support organization developed solid business processes, comprehensive measurement and good discipline. But that's all so last-century.
When developing and integrating cloud systems, the public interfaces and external "contracts" among services mean that design and architecture can evolve rapidly and in parallel. But when they do and the teams are not in the same room, this speed is an invitation to chaos.
Cloud projects are a nearly perfect fit for agile project development techniques. Even if your finance guys insist upon fixed price and fixed schedule, the tendency in the Cloud is iterative development and scrum teams.
There's no question that every company needs a solid pipeline of business - that's what gives you predictability, profitability, and consistency. The question is: How do you get more pipeline?"