ooda x cloud
Spending time discussing cloud in terms of mission objectives and operational leverage lately brought up John Boyd and OODA. The theory holds that:
"…to win in battle a pilot needs to operate at a faster tempo than his enemy…he must stay one or two steps ahead of his adversary: he must operate inside his adversary's time scale."
More or less: whoever moves faster through the process of Observing the operative environment, Orienting themselves towards it, Deciding on a course of action, and Acting--wins.
More: compressing Orient and Decide, the time between Observation and Action, enables you to change the operative environment such that the adversary is orienting towards and making decisions based on an outdated model representing a reality that no longer exists.
The application to any competitive market is obvious, so instead here's an analogy:
Observe - instrumentation, monitoring, data collection, etc.
Orient - analytics in all its forms, correlation, visualization, etc.
Decide - modeling, scenarios, heuristics, etc.
Act - provision, develop, deploy, fail, iterate, etc.
What does cloud speed up? And who has the advantage?