In this webconference, Simon Wardley will present his recently published cloud lifecycle work to help you sort through the noise around cloud.  Our research proposes that cloud computing is simply the anticipated evolution of specific IT activities from a product to a service world.  Simon will examine the benefits, risks, misconceptions, and management challenges associated with this transition, along with the competitive marketplaces and customer strategies that are emerging.  

Simon’s work introduces an overall framework for understanding the constant lifecycle changes that any organization faces.  These distinctly different lifecycle changes make 'one size fits all' policies difficult, create ongoing business versus IT alignment challenges, and explain why what's right for one industry doesn't necessarily work for another.  They also provide the key to helping organizations surf these constant waves of change.

In this session, Simon will address the following questions:

• Can we identify appropriate methods for particular business activities?
• Can I use those methods to determine the ‘right’ way of managing IT?
• Will these methods make managing IT more complex?

Finally, and leading on from this lifecycle work, Simon will introduce his current research, What Can We Learn From Web 2.0 Companies? which focuses on emerging organizational design and management practices at leading Web 2.0 companies.  In this project, Simon will determine what lessons we can learn from Web 2.0 era firms that can be applied across a broad range of industry sectors.

Who should attend?

This session would be especially appropriate for CIOs and other senior IT leaders to help further understand our IT lifecycle approach and how these ideas relate to emerging patterns of business and IT management.

Identifying these patterns and their many implications will be a long-term focus of our Organizing IT for the Future research.