From where I am, the potential of business process automation and Cloud computing have barely been scratched.  The road ahead is shrouded in a significant amount technological, financial and cultural optimism.  Like a road in a forest on a foggy morning we can see the way forward but have difficulty making out the details of the road for the trees and the fog, and at some point pure optimism and the imagination takes over.

From my vantage point of both an enthusiastic user and observer, and an active participant marketing, selling and creating technology for the better part of three decades, I have experienced a number of technological, and business and social phenomena, which have fueled tremendous growth in the use of information technology (IT).  I started my IT career three months before the IBM Personal Computer (PC) was introduced to the world.  The PC automated personal productivity with word processing and spreadsheets.  The PC dramatically reduced the cost and availability of the micro processor forever.

The next significant innovation in the evolution of IT took more than a decade to fully flower, network computing, and the enabling client/server architecture and communication protocols.  Network computing continued to grow as it connected networks via the Internet.  With networks "location" became transparent, I no longer had to know the network physical location and address for computing resources, applications and data.  And, the Internet further expanded location transparency globally. With networks, and networks of networks (the Internet), users simply have to log into a network and all computing resources they have privileges to are available.

As more users, resources and local area networks were connected via the Internet the world wide web (www) was born and suddenly we were swimming in a sea of information and computing resources of interconnected networks.  Global search and some can argue advertising, has made it significantly easier to find specific information on the www.  Today we find it hard to exist without our email, instant messaging (IM), information portals (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), online shopping (Amazon, eBay, Overstock, etc.). 

Soon after the www blossomed, the IT industry discovered it’s customers were not making purchase decisions purely based on a return on investment (ROI) calculation, but rather the number of “eyeballs” one could attract to a new web site, and advertising dollars became the new currency and business model for many successful web-based businesses. The web reinvented itself into what we call the Web 2.0 era (versus Web 1.0). Web 2.0 applications "collaborate", "aggregate", and "network" users, computing resources, and data.  Some examples we are familiar with are:

• Communications: voice/Skype, conferencing/WebX; info sharing/"texting" & Twitter, etc.
• Data & Files: storage/Drop Box, backup & recovery/Carbonite, etc.
• Processes: service management/ ServiceNow; project management/ @Task; directions & maps/MapQuest, Google Maps & Google Earth; etc.
• Relationships: customer relationship management/ Salesforce.com; business contacts/LinkedIn; social contacts/Facebook; etc.

That brings us to the present and Cloud Computing.  Cloud Computing assumes that the wisdom of groups is almost always positive and greater than the individual members of the groups.  And, Cloud Computing technologically speaking, assumes that every "process" can be automated by assembling, or “mashing” together, data and application (process) logic from "connected" providers irrespective underlying technology, which is accessed from a browser on any "connected" device.

The focus of my observations, commentaries, insights, and opinions on these pages is the ongoing evolution IT enabled process automation.