As a business owner, you're may likely be tired of 'imposing' IT jargon and concepts that you have to face in order to get your information system going.
As an IT consultant, I sometimes face a situation where I have to explain things to customers (or you may just draw the short straw and get the person who "knows-it-all") but at the end of the day, the only thing that the customer will remember is the cost and the deadlines.
On the other hand, there also are consultants who, I have to admit it, don't necessarily have the full knowledge of the matter, so in order to balance that, they come up with more jargon expecting that the customer won't notice nor ask more technical questions that may be cumbersome to answer - and not many IT consultants will tell you this.
So what's my point here? It's pretty simple, as a customer, how can you deal with IT consultants when it comes to adopting cloud-computing project? Especially when it comes the transition phase? Now, as the customer, you don't want to be 'fooled' by IT consultants who are trying to impose unnecessary 'clutter' that you and your team don't really need. But how do you do that? You don't necessarily have the required background so as to separate the real requirements from the 'nice-to-have' features. Or, that's what most business owners think, so they tend to entitle the IT consultant into defining that. And this is where you end up not truly understanding your own IT. Look at this site Oracle Partner
So how would/should a business owner tackle the transition to the cloud?
My first advice would be to "express clearly what you want to achieve". Often customers will approach tasks such as these assuming that they won't know anything about cloud-computing. While this may or may not be true, it doesn't mean that they have imposed on them things that they don't necessarily need nor understand. It's your duty, as the company's manager to set the expectations and ask the provider about a precise transition plan that comes with measurable controls and a set of advantages and risks. After all, this is all about project management, and if you have chosen to adopt cloud computing, you will have your own set of reasons. Don't get too easily distracted from your initial goals, otherwise you'll end up with a lot of unnecessary features and fuzzy transition plans that will make the process unsuccessful.
Let's take one example: if the project is about moving your e-mail system to the cloud, don't rush too easily into 'additional features' that will allow you to make that same e-mail system a cloud-based file storage (or whatever other feature that may sound 'swish'). After all, by starting this project, you should have some kind of terms of reference to stick to.
To sum up, my word of warning would be the following: there's a lot of options in the cloud-computing world (as is common in the IT industry) therefore, any additional features should be discussed at the beginning of the project, not while you are implementing it. And you can only achieve such methodology once you've clearly identified your needs. After all, a cloud-computing project is no different to other solutions that are introduced into a company: it has to solve a specific problem - don't fall into the trap of making cloud-computing a solution to all problems. As the business owner, you should be the one who knows exactly why and how cloud-computing can solve a specific problem within your company.
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