Srikanth
This is a known fact that a particular process of managing an organization or a successful management technique evolves through time and influenced by the available technologize. Modern-day cloud-based or client-server based technology is actually influencing in a great way in changing the business process management (BPM).
Cloud computing is no doubt the most impact technology in today’s world. This article tries to explore how cloud computing is allowing the IT management to do things differently.
The way organizations are changing
Historically, it has been seen that, in the world of Information Technology, main changes in management is influenced by the changes in the ways of gathering information. In the age of Cloud computing, information is traveling in both directions at a great speed, across computing system and possibilities like virtualization, scaling up or down for handling bigger workloads or automated security patching across thousands of computers are far more flexible in nature. This demands a more flexible organization structure which can respond to customer needs by adjusting itself. This flexible system depends on rapid data collection, analysis and over the air changes to product software if required.
The expected outcomes would be the changes in the way how products are designed, increased cooperation between IT and other departments of the business organization and increased level of customer interaction may be even designing products jointly with the customers.
How Cloud Computing will affect Product Design and Customer Experience
Companies have already started creating products and services within the cloud as well as create marketing campaigns as a cloud-based software samples. The cloud has also become a common resource for collection and analysis of new data, and a place where more and more artificial intelligence based services like image and speech recognition are offered.
Start-ups are concentrating more and more to offer their products and services through software-centric articles which continuously gather data. This means changes and upgrades are becoming a natural process.
The ride providing company Uber is an example of that. They have been able to create a model of a virtual convoy of taxis from private cars by using a combination of mobile software, large-scale data analysis, mapping and social networking.
In the industrial product manufacturer also, this similar process of gathering data and redefining the products continuously is going on. A New York based start-up, Oden technologies which manufacture sensor system for factories recently build a tablet-based system for performing complex real-time calculations. The project that would normally take six months was completed in 10 weeks due to accelerated testing and direct communication with the customer using the cloud services. The relationship with the customer is changing and in fact, customers are redefining the product, not the company.
Where else the company needs to change?
The question is how quickly the cloud computing will become as strong an influencer for the management of IT companies as the mainframe or client-server computing? A recent paper published by three academician states that technological improvements will not coincide with the productivity gains which may take even decades. The reason is, changes in the whole ecosystem are needed along with new thinking about how the improved technology should be or ought to be used in order to have the full impact of it on the business management.
Software-based advances like AI will be adopted much faster than hardware or another kind of technological developments. The influence will be from software for example, when a company builds products and services using what is now called cloud-native technology.
The shift towards a “cloud native” organization is visible
Cloud computing essentially means from a physical point of view millions of computer servers placed around the globe, connected by high-speed fiber optic cables. “Cloud native” software eases the stress of use and keep the low-impact alteration of any components of any software application. In cloud-native software structure, big applications are subdivided into series of “microservices” that can be tweaked independently without having any effect on the software itself.
