You can tell the Board that you’ll save money.  You can tell them you are rebalancing your department’s skills profile.  You can tell them you are enabling strategic flexibility.  There are umpteen plausible reasons for migration of IT resources to Cloud environments.

But will you tell them that the business is doing this to reduce its carbon footprint ?

There’s a long history – almost a tradition – of being less than honest about the rationale for IT investment plans.  The post-project audit team will inevitably ask, ‘What was it, exactly, you promised the Board when they gave you permission to spend this money?’   Will your answer be a litany of excellent deviations of desire – a long list of reasons, apparently ‘discovered’ en passent, that could have served quite well in the original justification but which you feared would ‘simply not do’, even at the third time of asking?

Maybe this time, as we look to the clouds, we can choose to set aside the stack of ‘evidence’ so conveniently piled at the door by supply-side champions of TCO or the obscure but impressively weighty theoretical underpinnings of the ‘new network economics’.  Maybe this time we can choose to ignore the reasons that suppliers might wish us to prefer and be brutally honest.  Maybe this time we can reach out for the ‘real’ reasons – those that are not wished upon us but are those we would wish upon ourselves.

In saying this I am not doubting the validity of much ‘thought leadership’ steerage.  The best ever tee-shirt slogan proclaimed that if you stretch the imagination it never goes back to its original shape.  And surely, the essence of IT-enabled innovation is just that – changing the way we do things around here.

Once upon a time there was a major Awards Programme – designed to tease out fine examples of inspired IT investments and give them the oxygen of publicity so that others might read, learn, inwardly digest, or just copy.   Nearly a decade later someone came across this archive of innovative endeavours and looked again at those who won the honours.  How had they prospered and what was it that made their achievements stand out from the crowd ?

It turned out that the winners had 2 things in common. 

Firstly they spent their money in places that seemed counter-intuitive.  The winners did not invest in the core of their business but at the very edge of their organisations or just beyond in their customers’ or suppliers’ enterprises.  This edgy investment enabled then to change their relationships in fairly radical ways – not merely saving money but building new opportunities. Much of the growth of innovation in retailing was fuelled in this way but even the public sector provided fine examples of enlightened self-interest.  Who now remembers the classic switch of the Ordnance Survey to printer-enabled distributors and an end to guestimates of large-scale map production for architects and planners?  Who now recalls the Inland Revenue subsidising the cost of modems so that accountants might adopt online habits ?

Secondly all the winners adopted a very different approach to investment justification.  They swapped Cost measurement for Value assessment and started adding up all sorts of things that had never previously seen the inside of a ledger.  What value flexibility ?  What value easier growth by acquisition ?  What value customer satisfaction?  What value better market intelligence?  And what value honesty instead of chairman’s hunch or ‘shadowing the competition’?

So, as you now contemplate Cloud Computing, as you are inevitably tempted to run with the herd and assemble authoritative tables of estimated cost comparisons and potential performance improvements, why not, just for once do something completely different and be honest.  It’s a jolly complicated old world and we are all in a bit of a mess - but our contribution to society at large (and in our own enlightened self-interest) is to migrate to Cloud Computing as a major plank of our going green strategy.   Go on.  It could be the right turn that you might one-day regret you never took.

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