Our Canadian Cloud initiative is intended to help Canada seize the global Cloud computing industry opportunity to revitalize their Digital Economy strategy.

It’s an ‘X Factor’ type program to incubate new ideas for this hot sector, like VM Aware, a $ billion firm in the making recently founded in Newfoundland.

We have a Linkedin group for this, you can join in too.

G-Cloud Innovation

Cloud computing is such a powerful investment area for government because not only can it modernize their IT and therefore enhance their business processes and reduce their own operating costs, but this same platform can also boost technology-enabled public innovation across a broader national capacity.

This can be aligned to government programs to create more of an ‘Innovation Nation’ program, such as the UK program of the same name. This encompasses aspects such as ICT skills and programs in schools and colleges, government procurement policies, small business assistance and direct technology innovation stimulus like a tech strategy board.

To ensure leadership in the tech sector there has also been a specific Digital Economy strategy that identified the core role Cloud computing will play.

In this report it is outlined that the government is looking to improve service delivery and reduce costs through adoption of “Government cloud computing, the “G-Cloud”, and they also describe the enabling role it would play in making the nation itself more innovative.

“with Cloud building on next generation broadband with high definition video and also more revolutionary applications. These will include tele-presence, allowing for much more flexible working patterns, e-healthcare in the home and for small businesses the increasing benefits of access to cloud computing which substantially cuts costs and allows much more rapid product and service innovation.”

In other words, it’s like an ‘X Factor’ platform – An increased ability to enable more individuals, departments and organizations to invent new ways of working, new processes and tech products.

Canadian x Factor Leadership

So what is needed for Canadian leadership in this field?

The technology magazine Backbone recently formed an advisory board to provide a response to the Canadian call to action, and others have done the same such as the skills forum CIPS.

It was an edition of Backbone magazine that first opened my ideas to the real challenges Canada faces, and with my own real-world experiences now too I can much better understand the scale of it and therefore what needs done.

In particular the CIPS document has some great ideas. Representing the individuals who are the IT professionals that make up the sector they naturally emphasize the skills programs, but also have a keen eye for the venture development that’s needed too. This quote is especially insightful:

“”Among the many components of a successful digital strategy for the ICT sector, one important element should be support for ICT companies during the product development phase, as well as during upgrades or new releases- specifically, assistance with the definition of user requirements to facilitate commercialization.”

There are a number of initiatives government could drive to support commercial leadership in a field like Cloud Computing, but actually the most powerful stimulus they can leverage is simply to become much more aggressive buyers of value-for-money Cloud outsourcing.

Working co-operatively with vendors they can harness innovative procurement techniques like ‘Forward Commitment Procurement‘ to help define the design schematics for $ billion tech products.

Driving a wave of application modernization by outsourcing to local Cloud services suppliers will not only equip those firms with anchor tenant revenues but will require them to develop appropriate G-Cloud services to do so. This market is still so embryonic that this will create a competitive capability with global potential.