With Microsoft moving from the desktop to the cloud, you might be tempted to say the era of cloud computing has really arrived. However, there are still a fair number of people who remain skeptical, or unsure about the benefits that cloud computing may have to offer. It’s easy to dismiss them as set-in-their-ways veterans, but the fact of the matter is there may be something more to their criticisms. To see what that may be, it’s worth taking a look at a Slate article from back in the summer of 2007.

In The Shock of the New Tim Hartford explains how modern computing parallels the rise of the electric dynamo. Although the technology for electric powered factories existed almost two decades before the turn of the last century, it wasn’t until the 1920’s that we really saw broad adoption and productivity gains. The issue? Simple ripping up a steam powered dynamo and replacing it with an electric didn’t do much to improve productivity.It wasn’t until factory owners completely rethought their whole system that productivity gains improved. Engineers had to realize that electricity meant the entire factory floor could be reorganized in a more modular fashion, that workers could be given control over the speed of their assembly line, instead of being tied to a single steam driven dynamo. Even after these realizations, there was still a lag as the necessary social changes happened. Workers had to be trained to take more responsibility, new factories had to be built on these innovative organizational principles, and old management mindsets needed to recognize the changes.

Hartford goes onto explain how these same processes can apply to the modern computing world. And although Hartford doesn’t mention it specifically, cloud computing is clearly an area where his principles apply. Someone leading a significant technology team who seems to understand this clearly is Russ Daniels, CTO and VP of HP’s Cloud Service Strategy. In an interview with Ars Technica last December he outlines why there’s still an organization and psychological lag between the technology of cloud computing and it’s adoption. Parts of the interview are highly technical, but even for the non-technical user, there’s much to glean from it. The three key points are as follows.

• Cloud computing is more than just scalable, cheap computing power, it’s a whole new mindset to solving computational problems
• There is virtually no limit on the amount of data you can store in the cloud, which means that applications can draw from a huge history of data to determine exactly what you need or want.
• Right now each application keeps it’s own individual data store, usually locally on whatever device it’s installed on. Instead, applications should seek to write and read from a cloud based data source, that it shares with others.
• Similarly, too many of our devices assume that they are the rosetta stone for a certain type of information. Our phones think they have all our contacts, our computers think they have all our files, etc. Device manufacturers should instead see devices as a local snapshot of some small part of data that exists on in the cloud.

For organizations, there are really two things to take away here. The first is cloud computing specific, and it’s simple to recognize that the biggest part of implementing any sort of clould computing for your organization, is creating an data hub, with all the authoratative data your organization needs in a single place, accessible from wherever your employees will do work. The second thing though applies to IT initiatives across the board. To quote Hartford’s article “Companies do not do well if they spend a lot of money on IT projects unless they also radically reorganize to take advantage of the technology.” As an IT shop that’s helped significant numbers of customers there is one thing we can gaurantee – any good IT project will change the way you do business, and do so in ways that you did not expect or forsee.

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