Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the FOSE conference in Washington D.C. (FOSE is the yearly government expo on IT issues) where Cloud Computing was the predominant theme. Among the excellent presentations were those that featured a panel discussion on Transforming Government Technology (a sample includes this presentation), and Social Learning Strategies in Government and Military. I also attended an interesting exchange between executives from Booz-Allen Hamilton, Amazon, Google, and others discussing the implications of Cloud Computing in their companies and overall.
However my personal favorite event was a Cloud War Game on a converted craps table. Yes, you read correctly. Cloud Computing meets Dungeous and Dragons - on a craps table.
Booz-Allen Hamilton had a hit on their hands with the Cloud Computing War Game (I'll call it CCW from now on), which took a converted craps table and sets up two environments, Standard IT, and Cloud Computing. These environments are mapped against constantly changing resources, internal and external, human and technical.
Since you have a dynamic environment, you have to manage risk and resources, managing issues in semi-real time, as a good IT manager should. B-A consultants (Or croupiers? I'm not sure (smile)) get to "consult" as advisers to the players growing their cloud organizations.
My playing time was brief, but instructive. You get a good sense for how much an organization may save (and the risks that could be incurred) by switching the organization to the cloud.
So all fun and games aside, with billions of dollars in annual government IT spending, when Washington starts to take note of a technology trend you can be sure there's something behind the buzzwords and Powerpoint slides.
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