The IT department is bad in marketing. We too often embrace a trend merely from a technical view and seldom stand in the customers shoes. For instance, how would IT sell sushi? Based on its features, the slogan would probably be ‘cold, wet, dead fish’; not very appealing to the customer. That’s also true for the cloud computing mumbo jumbo we prevail. Ever thought of how the rest of the world – including the boardroom – would react on PaaS, IaaS, SaaS and abbreviation diarrhoea?
We love the tech-talk such as ‘multilayer switching protocol’ and ‘virtualization’, but we forget the actual story. I see four aspects to the cloud story: 1) technology, 2) safety, 3) sourcing economics and 4) user experience. While there is over-focus on technology and security, there is hardly any discussion on the two real issues for the (non-geek) business: money and customers (business, users, partners and even real customers, the ones paying the bills).
For smaller companies and greenfield-operations cloud is very appealing: cheap and fast. Yet for large enterprises with tons of data and thousands of apps, the transformation road is bumpy. Transformation of the IT landscape from on-premise to IT-as-a-Service doesn’t come cheap. Especially in outsourcing during economically difficult times, CIOs, CFOs and CPOs tend to shift their assets to a service provider. Most old IT assets have to be deducted before you can enjoy the new. Unfortunately, much enterprises are heading the wrong way in outsourcing, by demanding service providers to bid ‘as is’. Acquiring people and hardware is an obstacle to pursue for a disruptive innovation such as cloud computing.
The number 4 on the list – user experience – should have the highest priority. In what way is our working life going to be better? How much does it cost when it takes 15 minutes to boot a desktop or notebook? With 30,000 users at Royal Mail the multiplication was 7,500 lost hours every work day. That loss has been solved once Royal Mail went to the cloud for office automation. Booting is one of the biggest frustrations for users. Response times went up with almost thirty percent once Philips shifted to a private data centre cloud for SAP. For both companies this resulted in higher user satisfaction.
There are many ways to impact user experience positively. The cloud is all about user experience. At Royal Mail user satisfaction went up from 6.1 to 8: a thirty percent increase. The users have new faith in ‘their IT Department’. That’s worth far more than just a spreadsheet-based ROI (by the way, which is less than two years at Royal Mail). Winning the hearts, minds and eventually wallets of our customers is the game in order to be successful in every business, which means the business of running an IT department as well.
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