Business leaders interested in the future of enterprise technology should stop thinking of "the
cloud" as a noun and start thinking about "clouding" as a verb.
When we talk about cloud computing in general, we're describing a set of efficiency principles only applied to once stateful compute and storage resources that are now stateless and liquid. Clouding is not new, and compute, storage and network are not the only things that can be clouded. Although the cloud concept has taken hold in enterprise technology, it's not entirely new to other parts of life. One could argue, for example, that condominiums and hotels were early multitenant housing clouds. Airbnb are modern versions of housing clouds delivering housing as a service, and similarly, Zipcar and Uber are car clouds, offering consumers transportation as a service. Anything can be clouded, if we put our minds to it. The clouding of compute resources gave rise to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). To make clouding meaningful, we can't stop there, and we have not, we are clouding storage quickly and successfully. This explains the success of Box, DropBox, Apple's iCloud, Google Drive and others. There are other, unconventional opportunities for clouding to drive innovation, and advanced thinkers are gravitating to the notion of anything as a service, or heck everything as a service (EvaaS). A modern enterprise with everything as a service.
In the new world of leading enterprises leveraging EvaaS, workspace can be a service (WsaaS); expertise can be a service (ExaaS); and business processes can be services (BPaaS). We can roll all three into an overarching industry as a service (InaaS) capability eventually delivering on the age old promise of standing up "XYZ in a Box" type businesses. When everything is a stateless and a liquid service, entire environments can be orchestrated for specific jobs, demands, roles or expertise, creating the opportunity to eventually leverage humans as a service (HuaaS). HuaaS would be game changing to how companies procure, leverage, and strategically execute on their most valuable and expensive resource, human capacity. Think about this as TaskRabbit, meet eLance, meet TopCoder, meet your human resources department. Employees working in enterprises are currently stateful reservations of human capacity, assigned to tasks needing their primary expertise and controlled by a single manager. Many times if an employee possess expertise outside her primary area of business, she is unable to contribute in other areas where said expertise may be needed shackled by a stateful role, manager, and job description. Today's employment model only takes into account the primary talents of an individual and ignores the reality that humans are generally multidimensional and useful outside the scope of their stateful roles. This means valuable human capacity is often wasted corollary to historic pre-cloud wasting of valuable compute and storage resources before clouding was introduced. If human capacity were aggregated into a liquid pool of stateless supply as enterprise TaskRabbits, or eLances, or TopCoders, it would allow companies to spin up and tear down human capacity to meet the human resource demand of projects all on the fly. Much like enterprises now spin up and tear down compute and storage resources needed. We may not move clouding all the way up the enterprise resource stack right away to humans as a service, but companies that move furthest and fastest into clouding up the stack will engineer the agility and on-demand operating models needed to win. In other words if you aim for human as a service and a cloud of human talent, you will find it easy to think past only compute and storage clouds. To get started, simply replace cloud as a noun and use clouding as a verb to drive discussions around everything as a service, both inside and outside of technology. Consider this scenario: My connected car needs a new alternator, but instead of my car accessing my calendar and making an appointment with the service center (which would be cool), it broadcasts its alternator replacement demand to a supply of local clouded mechanics possessing the necessary expertise (ExaaS) to change said alternator on said model of car. Those with the ability to accept my warranty (BPaaS) would bid on the demand/job, and then work with a supply of mechanic shops to find an available automotive hydraulic bay (WSaaS) and tools to work on my car on a time we agree on. What would this scenario mean to an automobile manufacturer's need to have stateful/dedicated service centers and dedicated/fulltime auto technicians on staff? When everything is a service, it's easy for enterprises to achieve efficiencies that we now only dream of. Imagining an EvaaS future is thrilling. I predict that by 2020, global enterprises with large allocations of knowledge workers will have commercial grade, human-capacity clouds leveraging ExaaS, WsaaS and BPaaS. To do so, we have to collectively get over the hoopla of only the compute and storage clouds, and starting thinking about clouding everything else.
Inbae Ahn Managing Partner, CIO at Polyform Labs Applying cloud-principles to humans won't work. Our 'interfaces' are not standardized and our QoS is all over the map. When I pay for a unit of compute I know what I'm getting. Outsourcing tasks to individuals? Not as simple. HuaaS can only work is at the B2B level. Example: GM outsourcing component production to Magna. o LikeUnlike(23) o Reply(3) 11 hours ago LikersThulani Mavimbela, Jim Preis, Gaurav Barot, PMP, +20 Replies3 Replies
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58619948688212 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Steve Messina 2 nd
Consultant Devops & Continuous Delivery Architect at Standard Chartered Bank I've posted elsewhere about this - but this is exactly where Cryptocurrencies tied together with a network trust/worth measure becomes a useful value. Think a google pagerank of work interactions managed via a cryptocontract. This would allow us to value the quality and QoS of individuals, and match them up in this model LikeUnlike(2) 2 hours ago LikersFei Ye YEW and Inbae Ahn o Flag and Hide Sandeep M Shenoy Systems Engineer, MBA I sorta agree with both views. I think we will go somewhere in the middle. When it is time for adoption people will figure out systems to standardize and measure output as challenging as it may seem. If the economics works out, technology and methods are likely to follow. LikeUnlike(2) 8 hours ago LikersMahdi Moradian and Inbae Ahn o Show More Flag and Hide Laura Ellis Project Manager, IBM CHQ Thought provoking for sure. Clouding as a Verb (ClaaV) surely the next new corporate buzz word! o LikeUnlike(12) o Reply(2) 11 hours ago LikersKen Norris, Leon O'Neill - NCS Support Services Ltd, Manoj chandra, +9 Replies2 Replies
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620000764019 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Akshay Patil Business Analyst at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. Ltd. nice i agree with your comment..:) LikeUnlike(1) 7 hours ago LikersLaura Ellis o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. LAURA, I love the way "Clouding as a Verb" sounds, thus far except you, I am the only other person to have every used it! Hope you shared, -Richie LikeUnlike(2) 11 hours ago LikersDannielle Muro and Laura Ellis Flag and Hide Vernon Everett Unix Consultant at OnCall DBA Humans as a service? A collection of faceless, nameless service providers who have no knowledge or understanding of your business, processes, internal policies, structure, political dynamics and have no pre-established relationship with stake-holders. What could possibly go wrong? o LikeUnlike(4) o Reply(2) 10 hours ago LikersRobin Lowe, Sean Stuckless, Lucian Naie, +1 Replies2 Replies
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620131697062 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Koen van der Pasch Agilista at Sogeti Netherlands Actually, Richie, easily described, repeatable, automatable tasks are candidates for..... automation. These are candidates for TaaS, not HuaaS. I think Vernon's right. Anything that can be done by the clouded workforce (WaaS?) can be automated. Does this mean your judgement may be clouded? Is this just Judgement as a Service? LikeUnlike(1) 6 hours ago LikersBart Van Pelt o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Hi Vernon, te large category of work in enterprises that are easily described, likely repeatable, and automated are candidates for "taskification" - there are many tasks that can be easily described and defined setting up SLAs etc. One way I think about this is not necessarily external folks being tapped to do tasks, but internal folks with multiple skills taking on more tasks than they once could in an effort to truly make human capacity liquid. -R LikeUnlike(2) 10 hours ago LikersAgus Yudianto and Razi Chaudhry Flag and Hide Sergey Ammosov Technical Consultant at Softline Company I see no humans on this picture. Only bio-robots. From "management" point of view I understand and agree with that approach. But from the human point of view - this is not that humanity should focus on. o LikeUnlike(4) o Reply(0) 5 hours ago LikersJim Preis, Rasko Pavlovic, h e m a n t . p a l e j a, +1
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620881125402 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Neil McEvoy Founder of the Cloud Best Practices Network IoT o LikeUnlike(2) o Reply(2) 12 hours ago LikersArno van der Merwe and Richie Etwaru Replies2 Replies
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58619883018623 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Neil McEvoy Founder of the Cloud Best Practices Network Sure of course LikeUnlike(1) 11 hours ago LikersRichie Etwaru o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Hi Neil, I am assembling something for IoT, would love a quote from you, are you game? -R LikeUnlike(0) 12 hours ago Flag and Hide Allen Adjamian Cloud, Paperless, Workflow Solution Provider Thoughtful article Richie Etwaru, though a little too aggressive on the timescale. For ANYaas to truly take off it has to make its way down to the SMB level, what GM & IBM types can do doesn't matter if the mechanic that would ultimately be able to bid on your alternator is barely paperless, let alone bidding for parts on integrated cloud systems to try to compete for your business profitably. You are pointing to niche independent contractor services and while technology may allow a taskrabbit-dropbox-elance hybrid for niche skill-sets, no one will be running a 10-100 person lawfirm, accounting firm, property management firm with any of the aformentioned technologies or work habits. I think the part of the human element you are leaving out is the desire to have a quality of life, with quality work in lasting quality business relationships and the workforce is not going to respond desirably to "spin up and tear down" human knowledge as if it's a VM. Where technologists and entrepreneurs should be focused on his how to decrease the workday by a few hours while increasing the knowledge output and compensation. o LikeUnlike(3) o Reply(1) 7 hours ago LikersMuhammad Abubakar Bhatti, h e m a n t . p a l e j a, and Gjorgi Trajcov Reply1 Reply
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620549701189 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide h e m a n t . p a l e j a 2 nd
Senior Technical Manager at Infosys I agree with Allen " I think the part of the human element you are leaving out is the desire to have a quality of life, .... Where technologists and entrepreneurs should be focused on his how to decrease the workday by a few hours while increasing the knowledge output and compensation." We should try to increase the quality of life , happiness quotient instead of treating everything as a paid service. human relations and bonds can not be provided as service , you need a relationship based on trust. LikeUnlike(0) 2 hours ago Flag and Hide Spokey Wheeler Director at Zinaida Ltd It all sounds so lovely, if it wasn't for those pesky human dynamics getting in the way it might even work. Nowhere in this vision do I see the idea that some people bond with each other in an organisation to make it better than their competitors. Nowhere in this vision is there any place for loyalty or trust, it's all just fodder. Something else that is inherently missing from the vision is that "the cloud" is, in reality, just "someone else's computer". This may have certain tactical advantages, but equally it comes with massive risks and extra considerations. There's no mention in this grand vision of the extra risks and extra work to "cloud" the rest of your business and infrastructure. That's not your secretary, that's someone else's secretary. Tomorrow, she could be the secretary to your biggest competitor and the day after, your second-biggest competitor. That's not your project manager, who understands the dynamics of your organisation and can work around the bottlenecks, that's just a warm body with a qualification. Etc., etc. It's a nice idea, but like so many apparent panace, it's half-baked and is just going to cause as much work as it "saves", to implement. o LikeUnlike(3) o Reply(0) 5 hours ago LikersRobert Marshall, John Glacken, and h e m a n t . p a l e j a
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620947934667 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Matthew Browning, RN, MSN, CEO 2 nd
CEO at IntelliBlast Health This is why we created IntelliBlast Health, instantly notify, confirm and allocate highly specialized workforces in healthcare, in realtime, by two-way phone, text, email, internet and mobile communications. Allow expert humans to function at highest/best use for maximum efficiency. There are three ways to meet healthcare's increasing demand- make lots of new providers, make lots of humans very healthy, or efficiently utilize the expertise we do have available- we do the later. IntelliBlast does it for any industry- "Uberize" anyone, any skill set, today. o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(1) 9 hours ago LikersAgus Yudianto Reply1 Reply
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620274814809 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Matthew, you are absolutely in the right track! We still need to connect, we need to write something together around healthcare. R LikeUnlike(2) 9 hours ago LikersWasif Toor, PMP and Matthew Browning, RN, MSN, CEO Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Hi guys, I am responding to all comments on the article itself. Thank your for all of the commentary and feedback, I am humbled to see the interest. -Richie o LikeUnlike(3) o Reply(0) 10 hours ago LikersKen Norris, Thabo Molokoane, and Dannielle Muro
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620104731840 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Korodima Dimitra Controleur Financier chez Embisphere Not sure about the added value for human beings ! Isn't there a risk to transform humans into robots able to perform only specific tasks on which they are experts ? o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(1) 10 hours ago LikersRichie Etwaru Reply1 Reply
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620094919056 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Korodima, thanks for the note. The idea here is that humans have multiple skills, and hence can bid on multiple tasks ... The article is suggesting the opposite of specialization, its is suggesting multiplicity of mankind. -R LikeUnlike(1) 10 hours ago LikersEvanson Nduati Flag and Hide Milic Bogdanovic Maintenance Administrator at AT&T Oh, I almost forgot we already have human-capacity clouds, it's called offshore customer care centers...where customer service is their number one goal, but ask the customer how that service worked for them, from credit card companies, to insurance companies, get ready to go around the world in 80 seconds, and accomplish absolutely nothing, except get frustrated. o LikeUnlike(2) o Reply(0) 7 hours ago Likerssteve hearne and John G. Moore
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620525568841 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Etienne J Coulon Co-Founder at PointGreen Business & PointGreen Solution Interesting thread. My view is that here we confuse a set of technologies, and a basic Enterprise (and Human being?) to optimize how to use resources. I won't comment on the need for more collaboration and all "Everything as a Service", but I believe there is a layer still missing which is connecting people who don't know each other (even if they are in the same company) and will benefit from being in touch around a Service (user- user or user-provider) Will it be a LinkedIn like concept? Will it be a new Search engine ? At the end of the day, the issue is always that you use a service only if you know about it, so it's a bit like a smartphone App: do you spend a lot of time searching? you don't have time right? so how to make things come to you in a natural way? o LikeUnlike(2) o Reply(0) 5 hours ago LikersAjeet Singh and h e m a n t . p a l e j a
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620920639646 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Andrew Heidt Partnering with Executives to Increase Profitability and Agility WOW, this is certainly an interesting thought. It makes me consider, for example, the staffing industry as an early attempt at HuaaS. Clouding like skillsets and marketing them on a basis of required expertise (ExaaS). Thank you for expanding my mind today Richie. o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(1) 12 hours ago LikersRichie Etwaru Reply1 Reply
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58619882200189 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Andrew, IMHO this is where we need to start thinking and investing, clouding compute and storage alone is not enough. Please share! -Richie LikeUnlike(0) 12 hours ago Flag and Hide Derrick Hyatt Esq. CISSP, CSSLP Principal at Hyatt & Associates LLC Clouding skill sets for secure application centric virtual network functional component(s); next phase for enterprise technology. o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(0) 11 hours ago LikersRichie Etwaru
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58619911401730 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Wade Wan Technical Lead at Wesoft People need to find out where the exactly position we are, and then thinking what should we do. o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(0) 11 hours ago LikersVincent Mammarella
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58619965152028 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Robert Ponist Grad Student at Rutgers University But by having a constant, ever changing, and static workforce can a company ever form an established community or culture? I feel this could be a glaring issue in the long term. o LikeUnlike(0) o Reply(1) 9 hours ago Reply1 Reply
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620281057360 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Robert, this does not have to be external talent - internal talent can have multiple expertise and hence repurposed on the fly. R LikeUnlike(1) 9 hours ago LikersRobert Ponist Flag and Hide Joe Wojdacz Disruptive Innovationist Good article, interesting perspective. Now, if we could just get past the idea of disembodied corporations as the Raison d'tre of Humans... o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(0) 9 hours ago LikersLeroy Mason
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620293057138 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Thabo Molokoane sap (abap) trainee at gauteng department of finance It is very interesting and mind proviking seeing how much can realy be done in the CLOUDING space..eye opener must say.. o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(0) 4 hours ago LikersTebogo Mashele
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620988749146 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Aravind Kumarasamy Student, The Innovator Nice concepts but not enough in this technology's .today every techincal person depends upon cloud technology because many of them access the cloud .In my point of view cloud is not secure for humans...to provide the double security or 3 tier layer security to protect the cloud database & cloud space allocated and so on..This function fully automatically or automated system if u want any information related to this technology's contact me o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(0) 6 hours ago Likersh e m a n t . p a l e j a
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620778617325 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Milic Bogdanovic Maintenance Administrator at AT&T Did any one ask customers what they wanted, or are these new technologies being pushed on the customers? Did any provider do a survey asking customers what kind of service they would like? I would say no, but asking average customer what they would like and they will tell you, solid Internet connection, solid mobile connection, do most customers really care about cloud technologies, or any other technology they do not understand how it works, most likely not! Customer don't care about buzz words like BigData, Cloud, OpenStack, etc. o LikeUnlike(1) o Reply(2) 8 hours ago Likersh e m a n t . p a l e j a Replies2 Replies
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90694996044391 20140415235145 58620421712463 ReplyCancel o Flag and Hide Dannielle Muro Helping Businesses Align Dollars and Cents With Bits and Bytes | IT Risk and Cost Reduction | IT Outsourcing Specialist Customers may not want or need to know the details of how technology works. Would it not be a disservice to them if we, as the experts, did not expand their options too? LikeUnlike(0) 6 hours ago o Flag and Hide Richie Etwaru AUTHOR Creates disruptive products & industries. Milic, you are right about customer needs. Customers may never ask to cloud anything, however customers often request lower costs and flexibility. Clouding (anything) does two things well (1) it reduces costs, and (2) increases elasticity (flexibility). Either of these two things, standing alone or experienced together; improve customer outcomes. Clouding is a customer friendly verb. -R LikeUnlike(0) 8 hours ago Show More Delete Flag and Hide Delete Are you sure you want to delete this comment? Delete Cancel Richie's Recent Posts
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