You need both IT and business perspectives, so invite both IT and business staff to attend the workshop. On the IT side, be sure to include customer relationship managers in addition to applications and infrastructure staff. If you are unable to persuade business staff to attend, it may be that the customer relationship managers and applications staff can provide sufficient perspectives on how systems might actually be used.

Be sure to block out a significant amount of time, ideally a full day, because you want to stimulate a great deal of discussion. Part of what you are trying to do is make sure business staff have a better appreciation of what is now possible. In some organizations, business staff have developed a learned helplessness. Since IT innovation was so hard in the past they may not at first even be open to considering new possibilities.

We have found it effective to use two projection screens during the workshop. Use one to present new material and demos, and the other to record the conclusions of the group on the various forms used in this Workbook.

Blank forms are provided in the Appendix of the printed Workbook, together with full-page versions of the figures so they can be copied and used as handouts during the workshop. Please also find the tables here as PowerPoint files.

The sequence that has worked for us is to spend the first two hours talking about and, importantly, showing examples of cloud computing. Since knowledge about the cloud varies widely both within the IT community and within the business, we have found it useful to start with an article mentioned in the workbook, the Wall Street Journal’s cloud computing quiz (the words cc quiz are a link to this page: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574414852513559232.html.) A Powerpoint version of the quiz is available here.