The cloud has the power to be transformative, but too many companies—and consultants—are missing out on cloud's full potential, according to Stephen Hasselmann, Managing Partner of Strategy and Transformation for IBM Global Services. Hasselmann will lay out how cloud has the power to fundamentally shift competitive landscapes by providing a new platform for creating and delivering business value as part of his presentation: "IBM Insights: Companies—and Consultancies—Are Missing Out on Cloud's Full Potential." IBM's Institute for Business Value (IBV), in conjunction with the Economist Intelligent Unit, surveyed nearly 600 business and technology executives around the globe. Research suggests that while cloud is widely recognized as an important technology, relatively few organizations today actively embrace it to drive business model innovation. Hasselmann sat down recently with Consulting One on One to talk about his upcoming presentation.
Consulting: How are companies missing out on cloud's full potential?
Hasselmann: This discussion is about the power of cloud to help businesses transform themselves. We all recognize that cloud's a technology game changer that creates great potential to drive costs out of the IT budget, to virtualize applications and technologies so that companies that can just tap into the cloud vs. building huge technology systems. But, in fact, we believe there is a huge amount business innovation potential associated with cloud applications, and we think it can fundamentally shift the competitive landscape and allow business value to be delivered in new ways.
Consulting: How so?
Hasselmann: It's a technology and capability that's associated with the digitization as products become digital; delivery methods become digital, and interactions between people and organizations become digital. The ability to tap into cloud applications gives us an ability to fundamentally change the way businesses create value for customers.
Consulting: Can you give me an example?
Hasselmann: Think about the music industry. A lot of people think just because the big labels are financially smaller than they used to be that the music industry is down. In fact, music is worth more today than it ever was. People are paying for digital downloads, people paying for live concerts, popular music is being used more and more in television shows, etc. The music industry is worth more than it ever was but it's the business model has shifted away from the record labels into many new players that were enabled through the cloud.
Consulting: How are successful companies using the cloud in a 'transformative' way?
Hasselmann: Those companies are using the cloud to collaborate more. They see it as an opportunity for competitive advantage and an ability to bring data to their customer teams in a cost effective way. That's only a part of it. The rest is about innovation and cost advantage. There's a framework for how the cloud helps companies innovate in terms of scalability, market adaptability, the ability to create stickier customer relationships, to ability to enable collaboration on a grander scale and ecosystem productivity.
Consulting: What about the consulting profession? How do you see its role?
Hasselmann: I think the overall message and challenge for consulting is to help clients understand the potential for cloud to be transformative, and not just a way to reduce costs. Often consultancies talk about moving applications to the cloud because it's cheaper, but they're leaving out these transformative value drivers. If consultants can understand how value is created through the cloud, then their business cases would have a lot more top-line growth and bottom-line market expansion capabilities. That's a hard thing for technology consultants to get their head around. The cloud has tremendous power to change business models to help clients create value in new ways.
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