Ask the Experts session

In this session, we talked about a panoply of topics surrounding cloud computing. My interpretation of the discussion(s) below.

• Space to watch : Cloud ERP services. After years of madness surrounding ERP's, there seems to be a lull in the industry at the moment and indeed, we are seeing this phenomenon too. Most enterprises, just like us, are wrapping up their ERP implementation and are now in a stable state. Going back to the Keynote, it looks like ERP may be starting to become a commodity. Do any of our ERP processes add direct competitive advantage to our business? Ie, do they allow us to differentiate ourselves as an enterprise from any of our competitors? And if not, do we need to keep ERP processes inhouse? This lull might be THE opportunity for "standard", and therefore more efficient, Cloud ERP services to emerge.

• On the other hand, there are few systems that map out our business processes as closely as ERPs do. And some of our business processes are indeed directly linked to what makes our business different from other businesses ie that add real competitive advantage ... and it is for this very reason that we've customised SAP and its dependent systems so much ... would we really want to re-engineer our business processes to reflect a standard set of ERP processes for the sake of efficiency ? It comes down again to the fine balance between efficiency and quality, cost savings and functionality.
  

• There are organisations like IBM which have IT as their core business. There are organisations like ourselves which don't have IT as their core business. It is interesting to see the variation in the perceptions these 2 types of companies have of social software for the enterprise and its potential to enhance productivity. Enterprises with IT at the core of their business seem to be very eager to try anything and everything social networking, to the point that to us, they might seem like they're crossing that fine line between blue-sky-thinking and naivity. Just different worlds I guess :-)
  

• When enterprises roll out social software eg. blogs or wikis or Facebook-type social software, we tend to mix up expectations we have of individuals vs. expectations we have of roles in the enterprise. In other words, as an enterprise, there is a distinction between wanting to empower the individual to share information/opinions versus wanting to empower a role to share information/opinions. The implications are clearly also different. Empowering a role is ultimately a way of enforcing organisation control. Conversely, empowering the individual may in some cases weaken organisational control, especially where there are value clashes between the individual and the organisation. Are we, as a company, ready to promote individual empowerment? If not, we need to be very clear that we are empowering the roles in the organisation so associates understand what is acceptable and what is not.
  

• Federation between the clouds will be driven by business requirements. We are already seeing some forms of federation between IM clouds, but this trend will depend hugely on what cloud customers demand.

This was the last session before our very own "Chocolate" Presenter took the stage by storm ;-)