AEC Industry Cloud Transition Cost Management: Part 1/7, Summary & Outline

July 22, 2013 Wes Smith

This series is targeted at C level or Managerial professionals in the AEC Industry without an IT background. I also recommend it for anyone that has interest in championing cloud computing initiatives within their organization or as a consultant. By the end of the series readers will have a self service methodology to provide a clear answer to the question... What is the Cost of Cloud Computing for the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industry?

At the recent CFMA 2013 conference the CFO and CFO/CIO rich audiences helped me validate my perspective that there aren't many resources for helping AEC company leaders understand cloud computing and how to manage the costs of transition. I attended many sessions, heard lots of questions, and few solid answers specifically related to managing the cost of cloud transition. Outside of the sessions I had numerous discussions with attendees further solidifying concepts that have become habit for me and seemingly very useful to CFMA members and others.

After the conference I did some focused research on the cost of cloud computing for the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. I found a number of good articles which I have included at the end of this post. The authors range across organizations inviting guest writers from line of business software vendors, software vendors, software resellers and general bloggers. Kudos to these authors for getting something out there, but none of them dig deep into managing the cost of Cloud transition and the few that favor cost issues do not use the NIST Cloud Definition as a vital organizational tool.

Through this series I will use my experience and the NIST cloud definition to expand on the common points from these articles while pushing forward to provide a working methodology and examples from a business focused, IT services management perspective.

The series will include the following parts:

Part 1: Summary and Outline

Part 2: Definitions

Part 3: Baselining Traditional IT costs

Part 4: Evaluating Cloud IT costs

Part 5: Value Engineering and Quality vs. Cost

Part 6: Lab Exercises with Examples and Tools

Part 7: Recap & Summary

Below is the list of articles from some basics research I did which primarily came from places I knew or the first 10 results from internet search results since this is what the average business person would find if they were trying to find answers. I have excluded advertorials and listed them by "ease of reading" and "effort" of writing and presentation.

Search Terms Used:

Cost of Cloud Computing in Construction, Cost of Cloud Computing in the AEC Industry

List of Articles:

The Cloud Computing Guide for Construction, PDF

by Various from Focus Research/Microsoft, 2012

[Click to View]

Cloud Computing, A Practical Guide to Software Hosting, PDF

by John Chaney from Dexter & Chaney, 2012-08

[Click to View]

Transforming Your Organization with Strategic Technology Decisions, Slideshare/PPT

by Rick Kilfoy & David Arbogast from Byrne Software, 2012-10

[Click to View]