Suddenly competitive initiatives that may have taken 18 months to two years to coalesce and bring to fruition, can literally take place tonight. . . assuming that businesses are prepared to manage this much change, this soon.

A real trend is one that’s self-sustaining, self-motivating, “self-propelled.” Although marketing does tend to portray products or ideas as trends, it’s often wishful thinking. Viewed in that light, a real revolution changes everything, sometimes whether you like it or not.

What has not changed since the 1970s is this: The people responsible for managing IT strategy remain uncertain that any strategy will yield benefits for any significant amount of time.

The whole point of cloud technology, say many of its practitioners, is to enable outlays for IT initiatives to be shifted from capital expenditures to operating expenditures.  Usually, the flow of responsibility in an organization follows the flow of funds. Thus the person ultimately responsible for any initiative is the one in charge of its budget.

I call it “the nuclear option.” To deny its existence is to overlook the real reason why the changes in business technology today are so important.

Of the four trends that analysts say are converging today to produce change in business technology — cloud dynamics, social architecture, Web services, and mobile deployment — all four constitute characteristics of existing systems that planners had not realized they already had in their possession.

Folks say they don’t use the Web any more, now that there’s Facebook and now that there are apps. And they’re quite pleased with that, they say. The Web, one person told me recently, was so much harder; and now that the iPhone replaced it, everything’s so much simpler.

Among the poorest explained concepts in all of cloud computing is the distinction between public and private clouds.  This is probably due to a well-meaning effort on many journalists’ part to pinpoint a “best-fit” definition that misses every vendor’s mark by an equivalent amount.

Cloud dynamics has the potential to radically alter the way governments procure, provision, and deploy IT resources. But that assumes they are open to change from the inside, which is completely contraindicated by the historical evidence on the table.

Technology vendors have stacked the skill set decks in their favor, by promoting a scheme where skills have brands.  If an organization wants to change brands, it needs to overhaul its entire IT division.  If money were no object, it could retrain everyone; but money always is an object.

The proliferation of construction paper-based security policy on college campuses reveals a more alarming, fact of this new era:  No one — students, faculty, or anyone else — is sufficiently skilled in the technologies schools will need to efficiently manage a cloud computing environment.