Over the last 50 years, IT has been invaluable as a tool for improving enterprise efficiency. Even today, this continues to be an essential role.  But as IT evolves to meet future needs, the industry’s focus must be to enable business and organizational transformation by offering sustainable innovation within and across the enterprise.  As market pace quickens, companies must become more nimble; it is imperative for IT to change from its traditional perception of bottom-line cost management to a new role in top-line value creation.  Instead of focusing exclusively on optimizing internal efficiencies, forward-looking information and communication technologies must support the business goal of achieving a competitive edge and long-term profitability.

Stepping out of the mold of a typical technology-centric focus of the IT industry, forward thinking enterprises need to explore new forms of computing to fuel innovation by addressing critical business implications of embracing the new over the tried-and-true and the risks of ignoring new technologies that can catalyze game-changing business transformations

• What technologies best align with new business models?
• What is the role of the CIO in enabling business transformation?  How can the organizational structure and culture support the new technology infrastructure or vice versa?
• What type of business or organizational culture is ripe for innovation?  What is the real problem that technology solves in order to increase productivity and profitability?
• What are the organizational impacts and benefits when the capacity constraints on computing are lifted?
• What are the economic and business implications when employees are empowered with more capacity and they can perform large-scale computing tasks without the structure of the traditional corporate platform?
• With economic fluctuations, what is the appropriate and cost-effective IT strategy? Is it greening, virtualization, cloud computing or "hybrid cloud"?  Are these technologies the best options for change?  When and how is one an optimizing solution?  What synergies or conflicts are associated with private versus public innovations?
• What will data centers and their energy consumption look like in the future?  As more solutions come on the market to improve data centers, what will become of privately managed IT data centers?

Today, the long-standing vision of "Computing as a Utility" is beginning to emerge. Since the early days of mainframe time-sharing computing, it has taken a quantum leap towards reality. By unleashing Massive Scalability and On Demand Elasticity, Cloud Computing has the potential to fuel innovations and business transformations.  However, the old adage "all panaceas become poison" applies to most new technologies, and it will apply no less to Cloud Computing. Judicious IT practitioners should mind the tangible lessons drawn from SOA and approach Cloud Computing from "Both Sides Now": the unprecedented promises and the daunting challenges through the prism of technology, society, business and politics. All things considered, to effectively leverage Cloud Computing, forward-thinking enterprises should focus more on "How to Cloud and What to Cloud" instead of just asking "To Cloud or Not to Cloud". In particularly, they should underscore the critical roles played by integrated unified management, performance assurance and analytics-based feedback loops for safeguarding the successful adoption of Cloud Computing in Enterprise IT.