Gartner Report: Cloudy Days Ahead

With all the talk of “shadow IT” and Dropbox bans over the years, the undercurrent driving much of it has been an inherent skepticism of cloud computing in corporate environments.

But in a new press release  (opens in a new tab), Gartner says that anti-cloud sentiment is likely to fade away in a few years, as the offerings improve and bleeding-edge technology becomes cloud-only—think, for example, Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering, which is only available as a subscription service but is frequently updated for end users.

“More leading-edge IT capabilities will be available only in the cloud, forcing reluctant organizations closer to cloud adoption. While some applications and data will remain locked in older technologies, more new solutions will be cloud-based, thus further increasing demand for integration infrastructure,” explained Yefim V. Natis, a Gartner vice president and research fellow, in a statement.

Ultimately, the company says that some skeptics will remain, with hybrid cloud uses winning out, but it will no longer be a blanket ban as it once was.

“By 2020, a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today,” Gartner states in its press release  (opens in a new tab).

When Experience Falters

@jamienotter  (opens in a new tab) reminds us that having experience does not mean you should stop learning https://t.co/BST30W5utB  (opens in a new tab) #assnchat  (opens in a new tab)

— Sidecar (@sidecarglobal) June 24, 2016  (opens in a new tab)

Experience is great. We should embrace experience when possible. But is that experience coming at the cost of embracing future knowledge?

Over at Association Success  (opens in a new tab), Consultant Jamie Notter warns that experience shouldn’t be treated as something permanent, and that you should be flexible as needs change.

“We do learn a lot from experience, but it simultaneously closes us off from future learning, because now we’ve figured out ‘how it’s done,’” he writes. “Unfortunately, that ‘how it’s done’ was at a point in time, in a particular context. As we move into the future, the environment has changed, and opportunities for learning and innovation abound, but due to our experience, we don’t see them, because we already know what we’re doing. We have lost our ‘beginner’s mind,’ so while we make fewer mistakes, we are also probably missing opportunities.”

Check out Notter’s post  (opens in a new tab) to get some pointers on how to move past these limitations.

Other Links of Note

“An internship should benefit the student, not the association,” Association Executive Management’s David M. Patt says in a blog post  (opens in a new tab).

Strategy as skill? In her latest blog post  (opens in a new tab), Meredith Low, a strategist herself, makes the case for a change in the way you think about strategy.

Borrow these daily habits. Inc. contributor Christina DesMarais breaks down the habits  (opens in a new tab) of 24 top-level executives.

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