In times of change, as current ones worldwide, the natural human reaction is to resist: changes introduce the unknown. They take us out of a place we know and are comfortable with and force us into something new. We don’t know what to expect, so we anticipate all kind of unpleasant events to occur.

The approach needed to face up an organizational change should take into account three main actors:

• Self: individuals have to see changes as new opportunities and challenges to face, thinking outside of the box, defining personal goals and professional growth to achieve.
• Team: nowadays teams share the responsibility and the resources for getting things done and should learn and change together.
• Organization: change processes are initiated by either individuals or small teams, but the focus of change is one which goes beyond that small unit. It is directed towards the entire organization, or towards other organizations. It is important to understand such social systems, and how to plan and implement change.

Once we have seen what are the threats to neutralize and the main actors to align towards a successful change process, we should face change management as an important project to perform: to truly deploy change management in an organization, someone must begin thinking about the deployment as a project that must be managed, involving both a “technical” side and a “people” side:

1. Adopting a common change management methodology for the organization
2. Forming a Change Management Office
3. Requiring change management plans on all new initiatives
4. Selecting key projects and training the project team
5. Institutionalize change management into the training curriculum

Current solution toward anywhere, anytime access to business applications is the so-called cloud computing (see previous post about what is and what is not). In fact, is not a really new concept, as integrates concepts as software-as-a-service, virtualization, outsorced Web hosting…

Accepting that this phenomenon will transform IT organizations (today’s mobile, interconnected environments demand new approaches to delivering business applications), as we know now, how can business technology decision makers face it up? Here we find a field guide:

• Select your cloud environment. Decide what type of cloud you need:
• Infrastructure clouds: raw CPU time and storage resources to run your own applications.
• Application Platform clouds:for developers to build and scale their applications.
• Software-as-a-service clouds: provides specific business apps like CRM,ERP…
• Choose a cloud provider. Perform a benchmark to assure good levels of failover, redundancy, resilience, security policies, and test DR capabilities.
• SLA Control as IT’s role. Focus on vendor management: establish service level and service quality to be achieved, and an economic compensation if SLA is not accomplished.  Periodical reporting is needed to review performance issues or outages, remedial actions and lessons learned.

Azure is provided with a full integration on Microsoft Visual Studio, to enable developers to publish applications easily on the cloud. Initially with the .Net services but will be extended to the Eclipse editor and other languages as Phyton, Ruby and PHP.

Important to note the good work with the API side, provinding three ways of webservice communication: SOAP, REST and XML.

Azure will provide services through this Microsoft Products, making them fully Cloud Computing:

• Windows Live
• Office Live
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft SQL
• .NET Platform
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Microsoft Dynamics

On this test stage the service will be free but with certain limitations on usage (cpu usage, tranference…). The final price of the service will be announced soon.

Microsoft is again on the top op the wave, with some delay respect their competitors in cloud computing engine services: Amazon, Google. Time will say if Microsoft have reach the service level of competitors.

The answer, definitely, seems to be yes: enterprises still expecting IT to deliver distinctive solutions that serve customers in unique and more effective ways, balancing cost,growth, opportunities and risk. And the question that arise inmediately from this statement is: how can IT show its business value?

• Alignment with business needs. IT departments (from CIO’s to junior programmers) should be aware of the importance of link IT services to business outcomes , both implementing process performance improvements and cost-savings technologies.

• Challenge the status quo. Those crisis times provide also a favorable scenario to go one step forward: IT concerned not only about reliable systems performance, but also about innovation, efficiency, tech development, etc.

IT will be one of the dinamization elements during current crisis, its role will evolve from technology provider to solution partner, to provide organizations within the necessary competitive advantage to weather this heavy storm.

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