The Cloud: a Magna Carta for the Enterprise

[MichaelDortch]

Several of my ServiceNow colleagues and I have been delivering a newly developed training curriculum to select ServiceNow business partners during the past few weeks. In fact, after participating in highly successful and well-received training sessions in Santa Clara, San Diego, and Boston, I'm now in England. We'll be training another group of partners here, then moving on to Amsterdam do to the same there.

Our particular location in England is the beautiful Runnymede-on-Thames Hotel. (If you're ever in the vicinity, do not miss the buffet breakfast. Three different types of bacon — a clear sign of an advanced civilization!) Runnymede is where the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, was forced upon King John of England by some of his angry subjects way back in 1215. The document is the forerunner of key elements of constitutional law across the English-speaking world, and a major inspiration for the US Constitution. Basically, it compelled the King to be bound by the law and not driven merely by personal will or whim. And it codified certain liberties and rights for the king's subjects.

Discovering all of this whilst walking the grounds of the hotel got me to thinking about the rights of enterprise IT decision makers and the users they support. And about what it takes to impose new thinking upon an inertia-driven status quo. Such as that represented by many enterprise IT service management infrastructures, just to pick an example at random.

I imagine that before King John's subjects got angry enough to force him to sign the Magna Carta, he and his cronies were pretty happy with the way things were. Even though many of their subjects were suffering every day due to that exact state of affairs. I see and hear echoes of this dichotomous disconnect in many enterprises today. IT decision makers are, if not happy with the current state of affairs, at least able to convince themselves that they cannot or should not mess with that state. It'll cost too much to change. It'll be too disruptive to critical business operations. It'll require more resources than we have. And so on.

Meanwhile, users suffer every day, forced to use unreliable, outdated, and under-functioning IT tools. The people responsible for managing those tools suffer, too. Inadequate, outdated, and overly expensive technologies force them to be representatives of that oh-so-popular "department of no" many IT departments are perceived by their users to be.

Fortunately, the cloud — specifically, the enterprise cloud, and even more specifically, the enterprise IT cloud — can free these electronically indentured servants from their serfdom. The enterprise IT cloud empowers IT workers and managers to reduce costs and to increase efficiency and agility. And it frees users from painfully unusable and unreliable applications, and frustrating actual and attempted interactions with their IT colleagues.

How do we know this? Our customers tell us so.

The enterprise IT cloud represents significant if not unlimited opportunities for ServiceNow customers and partners. If you want to know more about becoming or finding a ServiceNow partner, check out the PartnerNow program at our Web site. And if you're interested in how ServiceNow can liberate IT teams and business users at your enterprise, check out the "learn more" section of that very same site. And remember, with apologies to The Beastie Boys — you gotta fight…for your right…to part with the painful past!