The Grill: John Seely Brown sees economic silver lining

Computerworld - John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California and a co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. He was previously the chief scientist at Xerox Corp. and director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His research interests include digital culture, ubiquitous computing, Web services architectures, and organizational and individual learning.

Are there any silver linings to the financial cloud we're under? Every board I'm on is terrified of the financial crisis we are in. Everybody is battening down the hatches. But I ask them, "What are the new opportunities this might provide?" Maybe it's realignments of the industry that we could help accelerate. Let's look at the opportunities on the opposite side of this.

How can you help them do that? The value lies in the questions you ask, not necessarily the problems you solve. Asking a question in a useful and productive way often gets people to discover things themselves. You get stopped by the question, and you think, "Wow, here we have stuck our heads in the sand, paying very close attention to our knitting, and we have not looked at this from the other side." There is almost always a silver lining if you ask the right question at the right time in a nonthreatening way.

What's your advice for CIOs right now? Look around and ask, "What are the big structural changes in the IT industry? How do we use utility computing? What are the new ways to save energy? How do we start to use internal cloud computing and external cloud computing?" For example, if I'm in a start-up today, I'd not want to invest precious money in more servers. I'd be looking at how I could use the Amazon cloud in order to just pay for what I use and at the same time get a whole new kind of agility and scalability.

What is "internal" cloud computing? Shouldn't we be looking at these same ideas for dynamic reprovisioning and monitoring as a way to provide our own services? So, basically the CIO meters out pay-as-you-go, on-demand services to internal divisions. And if you do the internal utility computing right, you ought to be able to seamlessly bring in external resources on demand.