The concept of “shared services” has been bandied about the IT industry for over 50 years. Yet, past iterations of this concept have often failed to meet the needs of corporate executives and end-users from a functional and economic standpoint.

This is because previous generations of shared services were too often built upon cumbersome and costly systems and software which could not scale to give corporate customers greater cost advantages or added features than they could gain from optimized inhouse resources. As a result, only highly specialized shared services, such as payroll processing and basic hosting, prospered in the past.

I was recently prompted to think about what sets today’s Cloud services apart from past versions of shared services when I was interviewed for a SearchCIO article.

Today’s rapidly evolving Cloud services are permitting a growing number of mid-size and large-scale enterprises to gain … Read More »

For everyone in the U.S., Labor Day weekend represents the spiritual end of the summer. It is also a time when many of us sit back and take stock of our lives and the world around us as we prepare to re-enter the regular work routine.

The first thing to be said about the current state of our world is there is nothing routine about it. Obviously, the economy has had a major impact on the business environment and everyone’s psyches as well. But, even if we are fortunate enough to see an uptick in the financial climate as we approach the last quarter of the calendar year, I believe the rapid migration to cloud-based services will continue to accelerate and fundamentally transform the competitive landscape of almost every industry, including the public sector.

Although I remain a vehement proponent of the cloud computing and … Read More »