Agility is a strategic advantage that is difficult to measure in hard dollars, but not impossible. We first need to determine a few things about the business, including:
· The degree of change over time.
· The ability to adapt to change.
· Relative value of change.
The degree of change over time is really the number of times over a particular period that the business reinvents itself to adapt to a market. Thus, while a paper production company may only have a degree of change of 5 percent over a 5 year period, a high technology company may have an 80 percent change over the same period.
The ability to adapt to change is a number that states the company's ability to react to the need for change over time. For instance, a larger computing manufacturer may need to change in order to drive into new markets, but it may not have a culture that can change at the rate required. Thus, they don't have the ability to adapt to change, so no matter what you do to accommodate change through the use of technology, such as cloud computing, they won't be able to take advantage of it when considering the people issues.
Finally, the relative value of change is the amount of money made as a direct result of changing the business. For instance, a retail organization's ability to establish a frequent buyer program to react to changing market expectations, and the resulting increases in revenue from making that change.
These are just some basic guidelines around understanding and defining the value of agility and reuse, as related to leveraging cloud computing. It's important to understand the concept of agility, as well as the concept of reuse which enables agility, in order to better define the value that cloud computing will have within the data center.
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