Tag Archives: roi

The Cloud is like a teenage driver

Nobody is shocked when they hear the teenager just learning to drive got into an accident. After all, even with the safest car on the block, the kid just lacks the depth of experience.

Maybe that’s the same growing pain we’re seeing from some of the recent outages at many major tech providers over the last few weeks. Maybe we simply lack the depth of experience? We think we know what to do but aren’t really prepared for situations that occur just 1% of the time.

Developing processes, buying hardware, staffing up, increasing complexity…. Making those significant investments just for something that just happens 1% of the time. Tough to get 20x return on that stuff. Tough to justify when the “accidents” just hurt you.

Now imagine that teenager is driving a bus full of people. Those 1% situations switch from potentially doing harm to just a few to endangering many. After all, they are providing a transportation platform for anyone willing to pay.

Isn’t this the same for our cloud providers that supply many others with platform-as-a-service? Now when Amazon or Google hits a rough patch, the thousands of others riding on their platforms get tossed around too.

I’m confident that our teenage drivers will get better. They will gain more experience, plan better, get help, and most importantly realize their actions (or lack of action) can and does impact others.

Let’s hope the leadership of the new guard for cloud computing are brave enough to fight for funding to take today’s platform offerings from ‘good enough’ to ‘great’ since we are all now getting on the bus.

dimensions to the value of my work

I feel fortunate to have had opportunities in 2010 to work on interesting and important efforts.  Reflecting on the year, it seems the primary theme of my work in 2010 was around leveraging technology and innovation in support of sales efforts as well as IBM’s CIO organization.  

All this innovation and exploration sounds good but what does it translate into in terms of business value for my organization and for IBM.  The value of innovation and trying new approaches can have financial and traceable measurements…. BUT I believe the largest value comes from the intangibles and difficult to measure elements of innovation.  How should I communicate or quantify the value of my personal contributions into something meaningful for my management?

Here’s my attempt to capture a few important dimensions of value and key questions for each that hopefully span both the tangible and intangible with respect to the work I’ve done:

  • Hard benefits – Did my efforts lead to new revenue, increased sales, cost savings (such as sunsets)?
  • Soft benefits – How did my efforts lead to productivity improvements and cost avoidance?  Are the calculations and underlying assumptions around quantifying these ‘soft’ benefits reasonable?
  • Brand building –  How did my actions contribute to IBM’s brand image in the marketplace?
    • Knowledge sharing – Did I share details on some of the efforts and lessons learned both internally and externally so as to help others achieve value faster in the future?
    • Corporate Social Responsibility – Did any of my work contribute to improving our world and communities we operate in?
  • Intangibles – What other strategic dimensions of my work were important?
    • Innovation – How did my efforts lead to creative and new approaches to business challenges?
    • Influence – Did my efforts demonstrate thought leadership and help to influence the strategies and efforts of other teams? 
    • Collaboration – Are there examples where I worked to collaborate with other teams to find reuse opportunities and develop win-win situations?

What about you?  What are your favorite ways to communicate business value beyond traditional financial measurements?