Just recently a student of mine did an interesting survey with small and medium enterprise (SME) people in Hong Kong. She wanted to find out how they were using ICTs and if there were barriers for adoption of Internet-based technologies.
The results showed that although SME people (owners, senior managers) are well educated and understand how ICT can benefit their business, they do not invest too much on Internet applications but on intranets. To communicate with the outside world, most of them have basic information websites for their businesses. But most of them export products/services to other countries.
You might say that in this era where online transactions are the norm of the day in a globalised world this seems odd. But it is not.
At risk of generalising, I think SME owners (including my brother) are good at deciding where to invest their resources. They are very 'hands on' individuals. What is not clear does not get their attention. I still remember when I tried to convince my brother to buy a software suite to help in the accounting and client management tasks of the business. We settled for using a spreadsheet for each of these tasks. To communicate with our suppliers in other countries we used email. And for the payroll we used telephone banking.
As my student, you might also say that SME owners need first to trust in technology and in the people that know about it (let us call them technologists).
Technologists though often do not make themselves any favours by speaking in a very unclear language. Recently I asked a cloud technologist about the business benefits of the cloud. The answer came back with a number of unclear terms: Scalability, Agility, and the last one: Capability. With a capability to navigate through a sea of data, the business can discover new strategies, it can better interact with other businesses (see my previous post).
I wonder if these terms help us to trust in the cloud. For some SME and company directors, it does not matter how and where the data sits. But that is different from scalability, agility or capability. It could well be a way of not getting bogged down by these terms.
We need to create conditions for people to trust in technology. We need translation of terms, getting close to the users and their language. Cloud technologists need to do this regarding all these benefits. In addition, they need to consider how users are to learn to live with a paradox: The paradox of developing a business capability that is not necessarily under our full control.
Not trusting in the cloud is not a sin, it could well be a misunderstanding, but it is not the lay person or the users' fault.
2 comments:
Hi,
In one of the research projects that i did recently, i found contrasting results. Many of the reputed analysts (Gartner, Forrester) across the globe has mentioned in their reports, that cloud and related services are currently the most talked-about technologies, and Cloud Computing appears as the top priorities for many organizations.
"We need translation of terms, getting close to the users and their language."
Starting with "the cloud" itself.
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