Business leaders interested in the future of enterprise technology should stop thinking of "the cloud" as a noun and start thinking about "clouding" as a verb.
When
we talk about cloud computing in general, we're describing a set of
efficiency principles only applied to once stateful compute and storage
resources that are now stateless and liquid.
Clouding is not new, and compute, storage and network are not the only things that can be clouded.
Although
the cloud concept has taken hold in enterprise technology, it's not
entirely new to other parts of life. One could argue, for example, that
condominiums and hotels were early multitenant housing clouds. Airbnb
are modern versions of housing clouds delivering housing as a service,
and similarly, Zipcar and Uber are car clouds, offering consumers
transportation as a service.
Anything can be clouded, if we put
our minds to it. The clouding of compute resources gave rise to
infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and
software as a service (SaaS). To make clouding meaningful, we can't stop
there, and we have not, we are clouding storage quickly and
successfully. This explains the success of Box, DropBox, Apple's iCloud,
Google Drive and others.
There are other, unconventional
opportunities for clouding to drive innovation, and advanced thinkers
are gravitating to the notion of anything as a service, or heck
everything as a service (EvaaS).
A modern enterprise with everything as a service.
In
the new world of leading enterprises leveraging EvaaS, workspace can be
a service (WsaaS); expertise can be a service (ExaaS); and business
processes can be services (BPaaS). We can roll all three into an
overarching industry as a service (InaaS) capability eventually
delivering on the age old promise of standing up "XYZ in a Box" type
businesses.
When everything is a stateless and a liquid service,
entire environments can be orchestrated for specific jobs, demands,
roles or expertise, creating the opportunity to eventually leverage
humans as a service (HuaaS). HuaaS would be game changing to how
companies procure, leverage, and strategically execute on their most
valuable and expensive resource, human capacity.
Think about this as TaskRabbit, meet eLance, meet TopCoder, meet your human resources department.
Employees
working in enterprises are currently stateful reservations of human
capacity, assigned to tasks needing their primary expertise and
controlled by a single manager. Many times if an employee possess
expertise outside her primary area of business, she is unable to
contribute in other areas where said expertise may be needed shackled by
a stateful role, manager, and job description. Today's employment model
only takes into account the primary talents of an individual and
ignores the reality that humans are generally multidimensional and
useful outside the scope of their stateful roles.
This means valuable human capacity is often wasted corollary to historic pre-cloud wasting of valuable compute and storage resources before clouding was introduced.
If human capacity were aggregated into a liquid pool of
stateless supply as enterprise TaskRabbits, or eLances, or TopCoders, it
would allow companies to spin up and tear down human capacity to meet
the human resource demand of projects all on the fly. Much like
enterprises now spin up and tear down compute and storage resources
needed.
We may not move clouding all the way up the enterprise
resource stack right away to humans as a service, but companies that
move furthest and fastest into clouding up the stack will engineer the
agility and on-demand operating models needed to win. In other words if
you aim for human as a service and a cloud of human talent, you will
find it easy to think past only compute and storage clouds.
To
get started, simply replace cloud as a noun and use clouding as a verb
to drive discussions around everything as a service, both inside and
outside of technology.
Consider this scenario: My
connected car needs a new alternator, but instead of my car accessing my
calendar and making an appointment with the service center (which would
be cool), it broadcasts its alternator replacement demand to a supply
of local clouded mechanics possessing the necessary expertise (ExaaS) to
change said alternator on said model of car. Those with the ability to
accept my warranty (BPaaS) would bid on the demand/job, and then work
with a supply of mechanic shops to find an available automotive
hydraulic bay (WSaaS) and tools to work on my car on a time we agree on.
What would this scenario mean to an automobile manufacturer's need to
have stateful/dedicated service centers and dedicated/fulltime auto
technicians on staff?
When everything is a service, it's easy for
enterprises to achieve efficiencies that we now only dream of. Imagining
an EvaaS future is thrilling. I predict that by 2020, global
enterprises with large allocations of knowledge workers will have
commercial grade, human-capacity clouds leveraging ExaaS, WsaaS and
BPaaS.
To do so, we have to collectively get over the hoopla of
only the compute and storage clouds, and starting thinking about
clouding everything else.
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