GOVERNANCE = CONTROL OF SERVICES

Governance is a term used to describe the management and control of services. So, for example, if the role of IT is to help a thriving company develop innovative products and services, the IT governance plan might include several new high-tech initiatives to help achieve this goal.
However, if a company is using technology to help it survive a downturn, IT governance is mainly concerned with efficiency, saving money, and sharing systems.

Organizations are no longer asking “if cloud,” they are asking “which cloud?” by Jose Ferreiro

The Ultimate Cloud Battle: Public Vs. Private Vs. Hybrid - White Paper (see document below)

Organizations are no longer asking “if cloud,” they are asking “which cloud?”
Determining which type of cloud solution is becoming increasingly difficult with the myriad of choices available today.  Selecting the right cloud solution requires thorough analysis regarding the level of security, control, customization and support your business requires.
This eBook will give you insight into which cloud delivery model is best suited for your needs whether that be public, private or hybrid cloud.

Organizations are no longer asking “if cloud,” they are asking “which cloud?”

View more presentations from José Ferreiro.

#1 challenges of IT: IT ignorance, staying with an open mind, IT as a cost center ?

Multiple directions:
 - "IT ignorance" I do not want to say always, because it is not true, but often the people that would like to improve IT do not know what they talking about (e.g. virtualization, cloud computing.)
- "Stay with an open mind" do not stop to look new technology or better do not stop to put passion on your work. Do not see where you are or where you have arrived but always where do you want to go?
 - Sometimes IT is becoming HR. I find the CFO reporting relationship to be a red herring. In fact, an extremely effective CIO I met reported to the CFO. Part of her effectiveness was that the CFO lent financial rigor to her initiatives, and made them an easier "sell" to the CEO.  If IT acts like a "cost center", it will be treated like such. It is extremely rare to see a CIO who is unfairly "oppressed" by their CFO; usually they are treated like a "cost center" since they don't know anything about their business, and are constantly pitching technology "solutions" rather than solving business problems.

IT professionals need to become business leaders first and technologists second

Execution plays a vital role in IT. I also feel that CIO should align the IT resources with the organization business strategies and priorities which will build a stronger and more agile IT workforce. The ultimate result will be services that are more efficient, transparent and responsive to the organization. 

Is the cloud computing a technology?

Many people share a common mistake. The cloud is not a technology but a procurement model. Given an application, infrastructure component, service, or whatever, there is always the option to host it in your internal data center or put it in the cloud in someone else's data center. The underlying technology need not change.

It's just a marketing moniker in most cases, the cloud for most is the SaaS model aka ASP aka managed services... you get the picture.

The kind of cloud technologies that architects should be excited about are things like Platform As A Service (PaaS), http://cloudfoundry.org/ , http://www.openstack.org/ or http://www.heroku.com/

Add scalable data stores and things get interesting http://cassandra.apache.org/ and http://hadoop.apache.org/