Ooh look - an all-male panel at a tech conference!
The final session of day 2 of the Cloud Computing World Forum and these five have the fun task of drawing conclusions from it all.
They are (from left to right): David Terrar (chair), John Hall (Head of Strategy & Portfolio, Siemens), Simon Abrahams (Head of Product Marketing, Rackspace), Gowri Subramanian (CEO, Aspire Systems) and David Wilde (CIO, Westminster Council).
Things move in a very predictable manner. For example, when David asks if the IT dept should see the Cloud (which is, in this context, all about moving IT services off individual company servers and onto the 'Net) as an opportunity or a threat, the managers answer as follows:
David Wilde: IT dept shouldn’t see themselves as gatekeepers but as enablers.
Gowri: if they see IT as a way of adding value to the business, then they need to position themselves more on the business side than the technology side.
Simon: you can only be an innovator if you don’t have to go through a baroque approval process. They need to see this as the future.
John: IT departments have a role and a responsibility to drive forward cloud computing.
These guys are managers, they think in business-like, strategic ways. I keep wishing for Roy or Moss from The IT Crowd to jump up from the audience and say they don’t give a toss about the Cloud, unless adoption of it will have a direct impact on their job, in which case they want to avoid “enabling it” as much as possible.
But sadly Roy or Moss don’t go to these sort of conferences.
More’s the pity.
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