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The Urgency of Now: The Edge of Chaos and A “Strategic Inflection Point” for IT

By annie shum | January 26, 2010

Failure to learn, failure to anticipate, and failure to adapt are the three generic causes of military disasters. Each one of these three failures is bad enough. In combination, they can be catastrophic. Germany swiftly defeated and conquered France in 1940 due to the utter failure of the French army to grasp the nature of future war, to conceive the probable action of the German forces and to adequately react to the German initiative once it unfolded through the Ardennes. The patterns leading to the catastrophe suffered by the French are similar in some ways to the eco-meltdowns described by Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail.

In this guest post, colleague and friend Annie Shum poses disturbing questions with respect to our willingness and ability as IT professionals to learn, anticipate and adapt to the imperatives of Cloud Computing. Between shockingly low (15%) server capacity utilization on the one hand, and dramatic changes in the needs of the business on the other hand, companies who continue to use industrial-era IT models are at peril. Annie weaves theses and other related threads together, and makes a resounding call-to-action to re-think IT. To do so, we need to embrace a data-driven version of the economics of IT, to grasp the true nature of Cloud Computing without the hype that currently surrounds it, and to adapt software development, IT operations and business design accordingly. As the title of this post states, we need to start carrying out these three tasks now.

To read the entire post: http://theagileexecutive.com/2010/01/26/the-urgency-of-now-guest-post-by-annie-shum/

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