Alright, I’m all spun up this morning. I was perusing CIO.com and this article’s title just set me off: “The Threat Cloud Computing Providers Pose to Corporate IT”. I’ve seen tons of articles like this over the last couple of years and I just can’t contain myself any longer. I’m going to rant.

[start rant]

In Reboot, we talk about “Two Headed Goliath” organizations. These are big and/or old and/or slow businesses who have literally grown a separate head: their IT organization. “IT” runs so separately from “the business” that it is like the organization has two heads. The IT head is focused on serving the business, running themselves like a business, and competing with external service providers (not using technology to compete as an enterprise). These organizations think about things like cloud computing as a “threat” or “competition”, focused on maintaining themselves as an organization.

I bet if we counted all the articles, we’d find as many or more articles like this that talk about technology advances as a threat to IT rather than as a benefit to the overall business. The underlying message may be the same (cloud computing or whatever other technology advance is beneficial to the business as a whole), but the angle is all wrong.

I guess IT people find it more interesting to discuss how IT organizations deal with their “competition”, rather than how their businesses use technology to compete.

I just think it is totally backwards. IT people and IT organizations must shift their thinking … their internal focus is the real threat.

[end rant]