The future of enterprise IT has many names

The future of enterprise IT has many names. You’ve probably heard it expressed as On-Demand Software, Hosted Software, Cloud Computing, SaaS, PaaS and whatever-else-as-a-service.

Generational change

Forbes calls it "a generational change". Gartner calls it the "top research priority for CIOs in 2011". We call it the cloud, and its big news.

The cloud is a trade. You give away a certain level of control and customisation over your business data and processes, and on the oher side of the coin you get reduced IT costs, better infrastructure, and more expertise. If that seems like a lot of upside, it is - and it’s all thanks to the magic of core competencies.

Prahalad and Hamel wrote about core competencies in the 90s: the idea that a business should be built around what it can do better than anyone else. In the IT world, that idea developed into the outsourcing fever of the 2000s and taking everything into account into the cloud boom of today.

The message is simple

The message is simple: unless managing an Exchange server or fiddling with file permissions is what makes your business better than its competitors, why are you doing it?

With the innovation sorted, we should turn our attention to the API’s comprehensiveness and its documentation. Unfortunately, there is only one number that actually matters for this: API coverage. In other words to say, the percentage of things you can do in the application that you can as well do with the API. In a good API, this will be 100 percent.

Prahalad and Hamel wrote about core competencies in the 90s: the idea that a business should be built around what it can do better than anyone else. In the IT world, that idea developed into the outsourcing fever of the 2000s and in short into the cloud boom of today. The message is simple: unless managing an Exchange server or fiddling with file permissions is what makes your business better than its competitors, why are you doing it?