IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

What is Happening?  Saugatuck’s ongoing research with IT and business leaders regarding their business, Cloud, social and other IT-related plans and actions reveals that, while core business priorities remain very similar from the smallest firms to the largest mega-enterprises, significant differences exist based in part on the relative size of firms. These differences shape what, why, how and when firms acquire and use IT of all types and forms, whether suite-based, Cloud-based, traditional, or hybridized.

Our latest global survey research provides us with very useful data regarding how firms of varying size differ in their business goals. The key differences are illustrated in Figure 1, and analyzed in detail in research published this week for Saugatuck CRS clients (1057MKT, Varying Value Needs: SaaS and Business Priorities from SMBs to Mega-Enterprises in 2012, published 25April2012).

An emerging and disruptive master architecture – combining Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics plus Integration to on-premises Data Assets – is now forming to enable the Boundary-free Enterprise™ that Saugatuck foresaw in 2008. The Boundary-free Enterprise will not be constrained by organizational boundaries and firewalls, but can enable a new model of work and facilitate new business relationships that are not bound by time or place. Nevertheless, there are new risks and challenges that must be managed for its rewards to be fully realized.

Table 1 - Convergence in the Cloud: 21st Century Organizations, Boundary Free and Global

Saugatuck clients will be interested in this Perspective which re-examines the high rate of growth in Cloud IT within the Asia/Pacific region. This growth provides important indications as to how Cloud will develop elsewhere, as well as providing opportunities for international vendors to escape the doldrums of sluggish economies in the West. Here, we follow up on our projections from earlier research and look at emerging opportunities.

Key drivers of Asian Cloud developments include:

Saugatuck Technology recently reached out to a dozen large-enterprise CIOs and CTOs (all from companies with greater than $1 Billion in annualized revenue), seeking their input and insight concerning the impact that the Cloud is having on their company’s evolving enterprise IT strategies and plans.

In a previous Lens 360 blog post (CIO Insight: Importance of Cloud in IT Strategies/Plans Growing – Part I), we highlighted some of the key findings from Part I of this research, highlighting how most CIOs and CTOs have moved well beyond the learning phase in regard to the Cloud, and instead are fully embracing it in their IT strategy and planning.