Key Takeaways from The Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference.

I managed to gain some good insights today from two Catalyst Conference presentations on cloud computing / virtualization. Both speakers, Chris Wolf from the Burton Group and Mark Templeton from Citrix, emphasized the need for organizations to make deliberate changes to their business processes to successfully implement virtualization on any level. For most large scale change efforts like virtualization, the problems (and failures) often come from the people and processes, not from the technology. After all, technology just does what it’s told. To ensure success, organizations must take a step back from the actual technology to determine what organizational processes are in place now and how those should change in the future vis-à-vis the planned solution. Based on the speakers’ experience, organizations that are most successful with virtualization projects have made a commitment to analyze and change organizational processes as a first critical step to foster solution adoption and to maximize the delivery of business value. The successful implementation of any technology is never an isolated event as it profoundly affects both people and processes. An organization must recognize and plan for this disruption.