One of the underlying themes I've been sensing is that we have been spending way too much time on keeping existing systems going and not nearly enough time on looking to the future. It's the 80/20 rule that one of my blog posts talked about. I feel like, in some ways, we've had our heads in the sand for the last few years. We make changes to our infrastructure, but we don't spend a lot of time talking and planning for how the changes we make will effect our clients and what their needs are and will be.
At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud. We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time. I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around. I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.
The cloud is more than just technology. It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients. It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.
I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality. It's about being more agile. Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT. Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it. That's the challenge. How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.
We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.
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