Links for November 20 2011

• What cloud boils down to for the enterprise By James Urquhart on GigaOm – Cloud Computing News

  Quote: What you do bring to the table–er, service–is code, data, configuration metadata and/or policies that are, in fact, what makes any cloud service valuable to you as an individual or an organization. Your task in consuming a cloud service is to deliver those elements to a service that turns them into functionality that drives business value.

• Are you doing the dishes? Time to check your IT strategy before it becomes an IT plan by Mark McDonald on the Gartner Blog Network.

  Quote: Not every IT plan will be strategic. In fact for a strategy to be unique and differentiating, it has to be somewhat rare. Trying to claim that all IT plans have business based strategic relevance is not recommended as it makes you look co-dependent.

• After you’ve done your best by Seth Godin

  Quote: Successful people analytically figure out what didn’t work and redefine what their best work will be in the future. And then they get back to work.Quote:

• Innovation’s limiting factor by Jeffrey Phillips on Innovate on Purpose

  Quote: Most firms need to learn that rapid, messy, inexact experimenting, iterating to get it just right, is far more valuable than slow, careful, perfect experiments that only validate what we expected