All too often organizations start with an answer while being unclear on what the question is. Case in point: the US government’s Cloud First initiative. Originally part of former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s 25-Point Plan to Reform Federal IT Management, Cloud First called for government agencies to move three existing applications to the Cloud and consider Cloud for any new IT initiatives. Why they would want to take such actions, other than simply to comply with the initiative, wasn’t clear.
In other words, the answer was Cloud First. But what was the question?