Modular Learning Objectives

And now we come to one of the most critical and controversial issues in management information and information systems today -- that is, what has come to be called "cloud computing" or any number of variations on that theme. Depending on whom you're talking to, this is either the most magnificent advance in information processing since the invention of the Abacus, or one of the biggest hoaxes this side of Ponzi. The funny thing is that this is both new and not new at the same time. As the tale goes, once upon a time there was the mainframe, which begat time-sharing, which begat the Personal Computer, which begat client/server networks, which begat cloud-based networks, which oddly enough happen to look a great deal like mainframe systems, only someone else’s mainframe, where they own everything and then lease it back to you.  Obviously, we aren’t back at GO - network evolution moves in spirals, not circles.  But there is a certain eerie similarity to the earlier dialogue.

Cloud computing in its present dialogue form probably traces most directly to the efforts of Sun Microsystems, working together with Oracle's Larry Ellison, to chip away at the dominance of the personal computer operating system market by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft's whole business model has been based on the powerful personal computer (of course, running Windows software and a whole host of Windows-based applications). Microsoft actually came rather late to the Internet and the network model, although they have moved as vigorously in this area as they move anywhere, and the Sun/Oracle axis attempted to move into this relative void with a combination of actually fairly old technologies -- high-grade network storage including time-sharing applications, accessed through so-called "thin client" computing machines that lacked much local processing power and functioned primarily as network terminals.  The difficulty was that the cost advantages were not demonstrably greater for thin clients than for actual computers, and there were significant implementation and operating problems that refused to go away despite Larry Ellison's hardest sell.

But it turns out that this approach has had a significant renaissance in recent years, strongly supported by Google, the new 800 pound gorilla in the information technology business and a variety of supporting cast members. Pioneered originally by Amazon.com in the early 2000's as a way of getting some use out of their generally underutilized peak-capacity server system, the new terminology focuses on "cloud computing", which tends to emphasize the information storage and security aspects, and "software as a service", which focuses on centrally managed applications made accessible over networks. Vastly improved networking technologies accompanied by plunging costs of data storage have provided a solid technical infrastructure to these movements.

Despite the extensive debate about the advantages and disadvantages of "the cloud" as an approach to information management conducted in the most arcane technical language, the fact remains that a large portion of this dialogue is essentially about information politics -- that is, who controls the information and access to it, who can do what with it, and who's going to profit from it. Make no mistake; billions and billions of dollars are in play here, with all the big players at the table and the stakes being all the dollars to be spent on the next couple of generations of information processing. In this environment, there are as yet neither a clear consensus even on basic technical issues nor evident economic winners. This is a debate that will continue to be played out at all levels of information management for the next several years at least.  There is certainly a good case to be made for the value of either the cloud-based model or the more traditional client/server information architecture, and absolutely no reason why the dialogue needs to be posed as an either/or choice as far as effective information management goes.  However, since this issue is as much political and economic as technical, the symbolic debate is as important as the technical one. This is about fundamentally competing views of organizational structure and management being enacted in the information domain.

In this module, we'll review some of the competing points of view about these developments. Our aim is not to resolve these issues technically, but to understand why they are important and to develop an appreciation for the language with which the debate is being conducted, since this debate will affect the management careers of everyone taking this class in varying degrees for some time to come. You can never win an argument conducted in a language you don't understand, so putting some effort into comprehending how people talk about these issues will at least help ensure that you don't get wholly taken advantage of by partisans of one viewpoint or the other.