Who wants to be part of the Cloud Revolution? Not everyone.

IT CEO’s are sending a very loud, and very scary message to the market: "What makes cloud computing so revolutionary is that it can permeate everything your company does, from back-office processes to how it goes to market."

Is that a promise or a warning? Does a company want a revolution that permeates everything it does? A revolution means change everywhere – processes, hierarchies, lines of business, job roles.

I have personal experience of organizations that have found using the cloud has put strain on their established business operations and – most importantly – how they connect with customers.

Cloud has been adopted rapidly in those places where it disrupts the organizational status quo the least – HR, e-mail, software development and testing, data and document storage. In these instances, companies could do the same thing, only better. Adoption didn’t result in any dramatic disruption, and the benefits were immediately tangible.

The organizational impact of cloud is more profound in sales, or marketing, or distribution, or customer relationship management, and it is in these areas that disruption takes on an ominous note and the resistance movements begin to form.

Recent empirical research (largely academic) has covered the potential of cloud to disrupt legal and other organizational structures and departments. Faced with the cloud revolution, many companies may decide that the potential consequences of not adopting cloud in certain departments are not as alarming as the prospect of sparking an existential crisis in every corner of the organisation. This action is explained by economic psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, who observed that people feel less regret for the bad consequences of inaction, than for bad consequences arising from new actions (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982).

That decision to “do nothing” in a murky business climate is often accepted with more complacency. Companies hunker down and wait for business to improve. It is only a matter of time, though, before the big change will have to happen if they are to compete with upstart start-ups. “Opportunity”, “transformation”, “reinvention”, “game changing”: big, scary words describing a cloud that will cover the world, eventually.