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Business in the Cloud: New opportunities for information managers

Last week I delivered an invited keynote panel presentation at the 8th IEEE World Congress on Services where IEEE made a major announcement about cloud computing. The Institute has launched a coordinated worldwide effort to develop cloud standards, provide a test-bed for facilitating build-out of the standards and to offer educational resources on cloud computing. This announcement puts business information systems education front and center.

2012-07-10

By Michael Goul, chairman, Department of Information Systems Last week I delivered an invited keynote panel presentation at the 8th IEEE World Congress on Services where IEEE made a major announcement about cloud computing. The Institute has launched a coordinated worldwide effort  to: 1) develop cloud standards, 2) provide a test-bed for facilitating build-out of the standards and 3) to offer educational resources on cloud computing for global professional development and continuing education on cloud security, reliability, architecture and economics. This announcement puts business information systems education front and center. The World Congress on Services hosts several sub-conferences under the banner of services computing. New to this year’s Congress was the first ever sub-conference on services economics, and one purpose of the keynote panel was to establish foundations and scope for the new emphasis. Professor Hemant Jain, Professor Leon Zhao, Tata Consultancy Services Vice President MGPL Narayana and I each spoke to what has become and will remain an exciting ‘adoption balancing act.’ The difficulty is in aligning business needs and objectives with services computing capabilities. A large, very receptive, mainly technical audience took to what we had to say like butter takes to corn on the cob. Based on my personal industry-based research, most global organizations have figured out how to adapt and leverage services computing. That includes service-oriented architecture, web services, mobile services, etc. Adoption has increased — even given the current, nascent state of services computing. Imagine how that adoption will explode with a heavy-weight like IEEE getting behind cloud standards. It means that what’s been done so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Among the implications, I think it will be likely that students in computer science and related engineering disciplines soon will be learning more about business contracts. One of my pet peeves is that most service level agreements today are chock full of metrics adapted from network administration reports. While that’s an important angle, significant business issues often remain under-addressed. Imagine what it might be like if the details of a business contract could be automatically interpreted into in a fitting services oriented architecture. And suppose that solution not only pushes computing power to the cloud when business demand peaks, but also configures the business relationship in such a way that adherence to contract clauses (or a failure to cover some important issues) is much more transparent than it is today. But will that ever happen? We all know there’s always more service that one can buy to protect against unanticipated and uncovered issues. That’s usually a provider’s response to failures in incomplete contracts. Consider Netflix just the other day — when storm-caused power outages led to a three-hour interruption to streaming content services. One analyst said that Netflix shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket; it might cost more to build-in redundancy, but that’s a clear-cut matter of a solid cost/benefit analysis. That same analyst encouraged readers to buy Amazon stock. Traditionally, when standards are in place, researchers and new upstarts get to work on more applied functionality. They strive to meet even higher consumer expectations. That will be the case with cloud computing. For our business students majoring in information systems, that eventuality even more firmly grounds their need for solid business skills. They are going to have to be the ones who ensure that contract terms in a computing world increasingly oriented toward services are those that advance the business, support strategy and enable the capabilities necessary to execute strategy. Improving cloud services means it’s a good time to major in business information systems — or to return for a masters degree in information management.  

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