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Hey, that’s me in the IBM Systems Journal!

I was reading a recently published IBM Systems Journal paper called “Changing the corporate IT development model: Tapping the power of grassroots computing” on my flight from Chicago to the Vizthink Conference in San Fran this week (see my Mindmapping 2.0 blog), and came across a quote that sounded awfully familiar. There was a citation, so I went to the back of the document, and sure enough - a reference to a book I wrote back in 2003 called “Igniting the Phoenix: A New Vision for IT“! Glad to see it only took about 5 years for the book to become relevant :-).

The quote talked about the changing role of the IT department from solution developer to solution enabler. Cloud computing and tools like Coghead and our very own iBuild make this more and more a reality.

The IBM document concludes:

“CIOs have an important but challenging role to change the enterprise culture to one that encourages and embraces innovative thinking and individual self-sufficiency.”

Indeed!

The stark contrast between MS and Google

The NYT article on MS vs. Google contains 2 seemingly unrelated parts that illustrate the stark difference between MS and Google.

Mr. Raikes (from Microsoft) notes that Microsoft has spent years and billions of dollars in product development and customer research, studying in minute detail how individual workers and companies use software.

Later in the article, the authors relate the story of how some cellphone software a Googler developed was released just 6 weeks after the idea was born. No formal product reviews or formal approval processes.

Different worlds.

UPDATE. A great follow-up on this: Microsoft in Denial: Google threat is classic disruption

There are other related posts like this by Guy Creese. This post displays the fairly common lack of understanding that Google Apps is NOT simply a MS Office replacement - it is much more disruptive than that. And I think Guy’s comment that the adoption of cloud computing will follow the same curve as electricity is just silly, as if the pace of change hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Yes, it may take a while for companies in the USA that already have huge infrastructures in place to make the change - but the real growth will be in places like China and India, where there are a lot fewer legacy data centers and related bureaucracy to deal with, and where adopting cloud computing out the gate is a no-brainer.