Everyone thinks they are dynamic and cloud ready

The more and more people I speak to, the more and more they say they are "very dynamic" and "much more strategic" than competitors.

Now, I am notoriously bad at maths, but obviously we can't all be dominant in our market place. Some organisations have to by simple arithmetic be the leaders in the field, and consequently some have to be at he bottom.

I usually find that the ones that think they are behind the curve are usually ahead of the pack. They have taken the time and risk to their own pride, to look critically at what they are doing well and what they aren't achieving. And they set out to change, and move ahead of all of the other loud, flamboyant players who are busy raising the roof on how darn brilliant there are.
In technology, it can be painful to admit that there is some way to go, but without critically assessing your business processes and IT environment, nothing is going to change and things will be done as they were always done.

Yet consumers expect far more from organisations and that drive to be dynamic is more important than ever. Look at the recent deal between Morrisons and Ocado for Online shopping service deployment - this wasn't a choice, this was a necessary move that Morrisons had to make to keep up with the market place.

While they are crafting a simple online grocery business and reinventing the wheel, who knows how the larger players who are fully entrenched in the online market will change their shopping experiences in the future? We might start seeing 3D shopping, or simulated shops. Who knows?
But imagine if they don't critically assess what they are doing today, and keep plodding away doing a decent job of the status quo? They will find themselves ten years behind the curve, struggling to deploy a me-too solution to a saturated market.

Leading me on to cloud. Cloud is the end point of the dynamic thermometer shall we say. True leveraging of cloud resources in a flexible, scalable environment is the epitome of a dynamic and innovative business.

However too many organisations believe they are cloud ready and are starting to dip their toe gingerly in some areas and without inhibition in other less mission critical areas. However this is just adding a layer of complex and difficult to manage resources across the organisation and creating headaches not only for IT but for the business users that procured these cloud services in the first place behind the backs of the sluggish IT teams.

Cloud ready is about being able to effectively categorise all business services across the organisation and apply SLAs spanning performance, uptime, resiliency, security etc depending on type, volume and importance of the application or data. Once this step is complete, businesses can then procure cloud services from a range of interoperable suppliers and flex and scale the services as required.
You can be cloud ready without having ever touched a cloud. It's abut critically assessing your environment and being honest with yourself about the changes needed to be made. But in the long run, this means you can grow to be in the leader category I mentioned before, you can be dynamic, and most importantly or at least until this current fad lasts; you can be cloud ready.