Cloud Futures: Changing the Form of Organization

The previous chapter discussed developing the retained organization, suggesting ways forward for managing, harnessing, and capitalizing on cloud computing. What was not addressed, however, was whether in practice wholesale new forms of organization will emerge, harnessing cloud computing and challenging incumbents and existing players in their marketplaces. An influential paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues at MIT written in 2010 hinted that we cannot consider cloud purely in relation to old organizational forms: ‘Computing is still in the midst of an explosion of innovation and co-invention. Those that simply replace corporate resources with cloud computing, while changing nothing else, are doomed to miss the full benefits of the new technology.’1 This chapter considers the extent to which the benefits of cloud computing may reshape organizations themselves. The chapter leaves behind comparisons with existing data center and outsourcing arrangements, focusing instead on the potentially disruptive innovation cloud computing is likely to cause over the longer term.