The IT Cloud

I'm not sure how many people are aware of Graham Linehan's excellent sitcom, The IT Crowd which follows a small IT support department which lives in the basement of a large office building but if you aren't; you must buy it straight away….

What, still here? Go and buy it, then come back!

So what the hell has that got to do with cloud? Not a lot initially we can learn some lessons. The business in the IT Crowd really don't compare about IT, they just want it to work. The IT support people don't especially care about the business; they just want a quiet life and to be left alone doing what they want, which is fiddling about with computers.

So we have two clouds, a Business Cloud and an IT cloud; they'd quite happily float around, not really interacting without a lot of interest as to what is going on in the other cloud. Problem is they do have to interact and when they do interact that result is often a lot of noise and generally stormy weather (and in the IT Crowd's case; much humour).

If we look back through the recent history, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about IT understanding the Business; we should become true partners and understand the business drivers. I think what this has actually done has caused the clouds to clash more and more often; with the Business trying to tell IT how to deliver the IT function, not telling the IT function what they want, the IT function getting frustrated or trying to become one with the business and loosing their way.

Ironically, this often leads senior managers to decide that they are not in the IT game and surely it would be better to simply outsource the lot. This formalises the interactions between the Business and IT, sets down the rules of engagement and at least theoretically improves things. The weather should at least become more settled and the components of the clouds get on doing what they are good at.

IT needs to focus on becoming a service cloud delivering to the Business. The Business needs to focus on the Business but also clearly defining what services it requires from the IT Cloud(s). It is not especially important that we know what goes on in each others cloud but it is important that we know what each other needs and how we report on this.

And within our IT cloud, we need to define the requirements that we need from our infrastructure service cloud.

Openness? Standards, de-facto or otherwise?

Flexibility? JIT delivery? Agility?

Security?

Manageability?

At the end of the day, everything should be able to be seen as a cloud to someone looking from outside which delivers the right kind of rain in the right way at the right time. Cloud thinking need not be cloudy thinking. We'll just end up with a taxonomy of clouds with the characteristics well defined. Let's try and avoid Cumulonimbus clouds though.