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This week I attended the OpenStack Israel 2013 conference. The conference was sold out, with over 400 attendees in a standing-room-only auditorium. As I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel entitled “If OpenStack is the answer, what was the question?” Here is the video. Below is a summary of the panel’s Q&A. I want to thank the audience at the event for asking provocative questions, and the panelists: Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation Chris Jackson, Manager of Big Cloud Solutions at Rackspace Mac Devine, Director and CTO, Cloud Portfolio, Global Services at IBM Mark McClain, Senior Developer at DreamHost Sivan Barlizy, Product Line Manager, CloudBand Business Unit at Alcatel-Lucent and, for joining the panel unprepared when I invited him on stage halfway through: ...

I’ll be moderating a panel of OpenStack leaders next week at the OpenStack Israel 2013 event in Tel Aviv. Last year’s OpenStack Israel event was excellent, and this year’s gathering looks like it will knock it out of the park. Over 350 people are already registered for the conference, and the two days of technical training following the conference are already full. If you’re in the area you shouldn’t miss this conference. And make sure to introduce yourself to me as well. ...

Before you ask yourself “what can and can’t I do in the cloud,” stop to consider the larger picture. How will your customers know that you have adopted cloud computing? What resulting radical improvement will delight your customers? These questions help you focus on the impact you want to achieve with your initiative. The answers help you understand the facets that you’ll need to address - technology, skills, procedures, and behaviors - in order to achieve and measure that impact. Then you’ll be ready to talk nuts and bolts about vendors, tools, and cloud-appropriate workloads. ...

Whether you operate IaaS, PaaS, or a SaaS service, watch out for these three pitfalls to the success of cloud offerings: Encouraging the wrong thing. Measuring the success of the offering by looking only at utilization metrics damages sales. One cloud service provider measured the success of its IaaS service - and compensated its sales force - based on virtual machine usage. Little surprise that, for all the years that this practice continued, the provider could not land strategically important accounts. Like in any mature sales operation, your prospective cloud service clients should be evaluated based on several criteria, including: ...

This coming year tens of thousands of medium and large companies will conduct initiatives to adopt cloud computing - and most of these will fail. The cause of these project failures will be unrealistic expectations. The inoculation is a hefty dose of reality. Get your vaccine here. No one questions the fact that IT is undergoing a revolution and cloud is at its center. You need only glance at the article titles in any business and tech publication to see this. Cloud is a critical element in achieving unprecedented agility and supply-chain optimization. ...

Meeting business and technical requirements is important, but to what extent is your organization ready to accept the changes that your new initiative will introduce? In my work with global clients I’ve identified three critical elements that govern the success or failure of these initiatives: Diet: How much is risk-taking accepted, encouraged, and rewarded? Taste: How much does past experience support or undermine the changes that will be introduced? Appetite: To what degree do people see their jobs getting easier as a result? Like we (should!) do with our eating habits, we should create a change program that respects the diet, taste, and appetite of the organization - or changes those elements if needed - to ensure maximum health. Only when you and your organization are in good health can you maximize your success and capitalize on unforeseen opportunities.

It may sound strange, but your organization does not need a strategy for cloud computing. You no more need a strategy for cloud computing than you need a strategy for toothbrushing: as long as your teeth are healthy, who cares if you brush from top to bottom or from left to right, or what brand of toothpaste you use! So it is with cloud computing: your organization has a business strategy (if not, give me a call). Does that strategy include developing enhanced agility, improved time to market, and increased innovation? If so, then take a deeper look at cloud computing, and build a concrete plan to use cloud computing to fulfill your business strategy. ...

Building and operating a private cloud ourselves is simple, right? Give our experienced IT folks a budget for hardware and software, a clear mandate, and deadlines, and we’re likely to succeed. That’s what we’ve always done, and it’s worked out tolerably well. Private cloud isn’t so different from running our own virtual machine environment, and we do that already, so why wouldn’t we succeed? I hear this sentiment expressed often so it seems to be a widely held belief. But it’s wrong precisely 97.73 percent of the time - I measured. Unfortunately, too many organizations act on this mistaken belief and experience unnecessary hurt as a result. ...

Back in the early days of computers, or so the legend goes, when an entire room housed less computing power than in today’s iPhone, a large government agency had a serious problem: their computer system stopped working. Though it was only three weeks since the system had been certified, the startup sequence refused to complete, leaving the agency lacking critical operational capabilities. Work on the project ground to a halt while every engineer on staff checked and rechecked wiring, tubes, and relays to find the issue. But two weeks of troubleshooting amounted to nothing, and the Director of the agency was beside himself with frustration. He decided to hire the worldwide expert on such computer systems, a retired professor who was known for his sense of humor. ...

Simon Wardley recently satirized the typical response of corporate IT departments to technology change as follows: Ignore, ignore, ignore, “no”, “no”, “I said ’no,’ dammit”, “Oh no”, “Oh, f**k”. It reminds me of the classic Toys-R-Us TV commercial from the 1980s featuring children singing about not wanting to grow up. Resistance to change is not unique to children or to IT departments - it is a feature of every organization. How can you help your organization avoid being stuck, and instead drive change before it’s unnecessarily painful to “grow up”? The key is urgency. Growing up is a good metaphor for organizational change: both are normal, both feature resistance, and in both the stakes increase over time. Immature people, like immature organizations, do not reliably achieve their goals. And the longer that inertia dominates, the further behind they remain. Failure to adapt - getting stuck - can be fatal, as it was for the Eastman Kodak Company. In personal as in organizational growth the pressure to change - the urgency - is fostered by discomfort. To increase urgency you need to cause people to feel discomfort with the current state of affairs. John P. Kotter’s seminal work Leading Change offers several kinds of tactics to increase urgency: ...