How many pieces of paper, forms, approvals and other impediments to getting deals done has ‘usual business practice’ put in the way of winning on customer experience? One of the advantages of migrating to the Cloud is that it offers companies a chance to fundamentally transform how they engage, serve and ultimately delight their customers.In the past – innovating around the customer experience was more complex. Designing some nice looking interfaces was not enough – you also had to fundamentally re-engineer whole parts of your back end operations as well. In the Cloud centric enterprise, you can start to think of your data and services as modular components that you can combine in intuitive ways. Discuss with your team how might leverage your new technology infrastructure in the future. What kinds of mobile applications might you deploy that you were not able to a few years ago? Can you partner with other companies and platforms and create compelling new services through inter-connected Clouds?

4. RE-WRITE THE RULES

If you could create a new product or service, at a fraction of the normal price but with a better service proposition for your customers – would you do it? Or would you wait for one of your competitors to disrupt your industry first? One of my clients was the CEO of an accounting software company. For many years they had enjoyed a comfortable business selling practice management software to accounting firms. However in recent years, new Cloud based platforms had made life difficult – not just for them, but for many of their clients. When I asked the CEO to explain – he said that the problem was not that their competitor was giving away partner editions of their software away for free but rather new Cloud platforms like Xero had led to thousands of cut price accountants, working out of cafes – who were now challenging the economics of small business audit. Here’s your challenge – how might technology impact your plans for re-writing the rules of your industry? Front office business functions are not the only opportunity. Sometimes the most interesting ideas come from when you make services like business analytics more available to your front line people, or you start to integrate realtime information from back office functions. How might you change the way you run manufacturing, logistics, or your supply chain – and in doing so, disrupt your product or service offering to the market?

5. RE-EVALUATE YOUR COST CURVES

The final, and perhaps most important thing you need to know about the Cloud is how it changes the way you think about costs. In a traditional IT based organisation, costs are a step function. Launching a new division, adding more people or planning a new product or service will in the short term dramatically shift your cost base to a new level, amortised with time over new revenue growth.The Cloud offers leaders a very different calculus. Even the smallest of companies or startups can access world class applications, storage or computation services on a per user basis, allowing them to ramp up very quickly as demand increases. Think about it. Could Instagram have scaled to millions of users and sold for a billion dollars in twelve months on a traditional technology development model? And even if you can’t imagine how your organisation could innovate as nimbly as an Internet startup – what would happen if one of your competitors did?

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I’ve asked you to consider lots of new questions, but hopefully one idea is very clear. The Cloud is a strategic discussion that belongs in the boardroom, not in the basement.

Here’s my advice – plan an executive team meeting in the near future to brainstorm the issues raised by these five points, and while you are at it – put the most important question of all on the agenda. How can new technology not only change, but help you re-imagine the way you do business?