- [Brad] It's lunch time
and this is Brad Anderson's Lunch Break.
(upbeat music)
Two of my favorite things about Microsoft
are the smart people that constantly visit campus
and the great fleet of shuttles.
Wherever I can, I try to take advantage
of both of these things and grab lunch
with some of the tech industry's best and brightest.
Today I'm talking with veteran tech journalist Tim Anderson.
(cheerful piano music)
- [Brad] Hey Tim good afternoon, how are you?
- [Tim] Good to see you!
- [Brad] Good to see you as well.
Tim, you've been covering technology for a really long time.
What was the first piece you wrote?
- Well I think it was about 1988 or 1989.
- [Brad] Do you remember what it was about,
your first article?
- It was about the Atari ST.
- Wow okay.
- Which you may remember as a games machine
but it was quite popular as a business computer
that was much better value than a Macintosh
if you wanted to have a graphical interface.
- Yeah.
- [Tim] Pretty fantastic machine for its day.
- So you talk about the move to the Cloud
has gone faster than what you had anticipated.
What are the primary reasons driving that accelerated move?
- One is that the fear aspect is diminishing as people see
other organizations moving to the Cloud successfully
and it's working for them.
There are sectors in which you cannot afford not to move
to the Cloud because it is a competitive advantage.
- Yeah.
- If you ignore the competitive advantage
eventually your competitors get ahead of you.
One of things that we've seen in recent years
is where the Cloud solutions have got features
which are effectively unmatchable on premises
except perhaps with the very largest enterprises.
- Yep.
- We've seen companies put features into their
Cloud offerings that are ahead of and with a higher rate
of improvement than they achieve for their on-premises.
- Yeah.
- Deployments.
- Yeah.
What are companies that are successfully
modernizing themselves doing differently
than those who are kind of like slow?
- One of the things that I've always seen in my
technology coverage over the years has been that
even when the technology is fantastic,
it can't succeed if the organizational culture is wrong.
The lesson there is that you have to
be willing to change your culture
as well as your computing to make best use of technology.
- I have seen organizations who have also tried
to move to a new technology, to a new way of doing things.
But without changing their culture
it fails or takes longer than it should.
- Cloud is a challenge here because we have seen
in certain respects the power, if you like
of the IT organization within a business
has in some respects declined.
Because they're no longer masters of their own kingdom
in terms of everything has to happen in their base center.
And letting go of some of those responsibilities
is challenging and difficult.
- That's definitely a cultural change but would you
also argue that by letting go of some of those pieces
that were really kind of important
but not necessarily adding value to their business
does it free time for IT to be able to add more value?
- Well of course and there's still a shortage
of the IT contribution, if you like, to a business
whether that's in terms of developing applications
or improving applications,
or whether it's in terms of just enabling users
to make better use of the resources
that are available to them.
It does somewhat break my heart to see users
with a hugely rich range of resources
that are available in something like Office 365,
those types of services, but using only
a tiny fraction, using just the email.
- Or you move to a Cloud service that has so much more
capability but you only do what you did in the past
and don't take advantage of the new capabilities.
- Right.
- [Brad] Yeah, that's sad.
- [Tim] Yeah.
- [Brad] Next time on Brad Anderson's Lunch Break.
- Every organization has got data that it cares about
and what we care about most in terms of security
is who has access to that data.
- [Brad] Exactly.
- And also we perhaps care about
who doesn't have access to that data.
- Well said.
- So clearly it's the identity is at the heart of that.