10 Feb 10 What’s the Cost of NO?

“Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside us.”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

There was a great post by Michael Cote of Redmonk about Agile Development and Cloud Computing last week. Two topics that are near and dear to my heart. Till now, most of the arguments for and against Cloud Computing have have been considered mainly operations issues but its high time we take the discussion outside of operations as Cote has done in this presentation.

When I was at Social Media Group I was determined to build an IT infrastructure that existed entirely in the cloud. It included groupware, contact management, collaboration, file storage, presence apps, a development infrastructure for web applications, and was implemented without installing a single physical server.  Besides being cheap and flexible, it meant we could be connected from anywhere. But the real value of this infrastructure was that we could turn on a dime when responding to requests from clients for web applications. Developers never had to worry about servers and licenses and databases but instead could focus on doing what they did best, develop stuff. Now I can almost hear the rumbling from the traditional IT folks about how this is fine for a small agency but could never scale for a large enterprise.

My response to that is, RUBBISH, of course it can.

Over the years I have spent a lot of time in meetings listening to people making impassioned pleas for IT resources to help them explore ideas to solve their business problems. The standard response was to throw up as many barriers as possible to avoid having to do anything. Do any of these sound familiar?

• which server are you going to use?
• do you have the appropriate OS and DB licenses?
• our developers are busy, which of your existing projects are you willing to sacrifice for this?
• have you filled in the 10+ page application development request form?
• do you have the appropriate approvals and signatures?
• who’s going to pay for this?

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

There are probably tons of ideas being generated in organizations everyday, some are silly, some are brilliant and some need further exploration. Most of them never see the light of day. But what does it cost to say NO when the alternative is to try some the of solutions available in the cloud? Like this solution from Rackspace that allows you to spin up a server in the cloud in a matter of minutes. For the price of a latte a developer can get a dedicated sandbox to build a prototype and validate any or all of the ideas being proposed. Combine this with the principles of Agile development and E20 collaboration and suddenly your IT department is smoking hot and adding real value to the business. So what if half of the prototypes are duds that never go anywhere? It’s still cheaper than taking the traditional route and, for the ones that show promise, a prototype gives you something to touch and feel that can be expanded on and improved.

I know Cloud Computing is a scary topic for a lot of folks but it’s early days yet. The vendors need to be aware of the what’s preventing adoption and work to find solutions that people will feel comfortable with. But in the meanwhile it doesn’t have to be an “either or” situation. The cloud is perfect for low risk, cost effective incubators of innovation. Perhaps it’s a way for some of us to actually have our music heard.