A Little Less Cloudy: A New Chapter in the Struggle for Business Solution Ownership

Just over two years ago I wrote a piece for MSDynamicsWorld titled "The Real Disconnect Fueling the Cloud Craze?" Based on comments from customers and other MVP's it was clear to me then that much of what was fueling the cloud buzz on the business side was really a backlash against IT. Sales, Human Resources and Finance wanted greater control over their applications. They didn't want to wait for IT to takes weeks to setup servers, manage security, etc. They also hated when IT wouldn't learn enough about business specific products to support them. The business side wanted applications now, and they wanted them to be supported.

Fast forward two years and ZDNet is out with a story that cloud decisions are increasingly being made by the business side, not by IT. Welcome to the party. In fairness, ZDNet brings an actual study to back up their assertions. The article looks at a recently release Capgemini study done in the UK that contends that 45% of cloud decisions are now being made by the business side. This is roughly equal to the percentage being done by IT with the remaining pieces handled somewhere else in the company.

The assertions of business users are not completely out of bounds. I've recently seen cases where internal IT departments make decisions that are detrimental to the business. In one example, IT dialed back the memory on a reporting and budgeting server in the middle of the budgeting process. The result was chaos as company-wide budgeting slowed to a crawl and everyone denied responsibility. In another case, IT made infrastructure changes without confirming the effect of those changes on Dynamics GP. Users ...