Disruptive tech in the workplace

There were several very interesting presentations made on the various disruptive technologies. The assignment to to choose one of the technologies for use in my place of work was an interesting problem. The University that I work for has stated that its technology goals include adopting technology earlier into the Gartner hype circle. We already use some of the technology on campus. The campus has embraced social networking. We have been developing web mashups. There are other technologies that do not apply to a university, such as the full body scanners. At least i would not like to work here if we did.

There is an obvious choice, though, and it was not made by me. The CIO for the University had named cloud computing to be the future, and we must boldly step towards it.

The question is not when, but how. Nearly every new application being brought on campus is being looked at through the view of placement on the cloud. I am not sure that I agree with this view yet, but it is only because I am not sure that it will work as well as we are told it will work.

Costing for the clouds, while advertised as low, can actually be more expensive then traditional servers, depending on the costing scheme. Many of the cloud based systems are cheaper only if you reduce your workforce - and that simply is not the University way. There are still many questions to be answered before cloud technology will be fully accepted, but I think that many of those questions are going to have to be answered on the fly.