Cloud computing has removed the previous barriers to entry that kept competitors out, allowing a pace of innovation never before seen. Established firms must also use cloud computing to meet these new customer requirements as follows.

• Reduce IT complexity, allowing more focus on business outcomes (customer experience) vs. the operational aspects of keeping systems functional. The sole purpose of IT is business process support. Making your cloud efforts focus on improving customer experience is the first step toward becoming agile.
• Increase efficiency through improved asset utilization, aggregating demand, and accelerating consolidation. These actions lead to improved productivity in development, engineering, and operations. It also reduces administrative costs. Cloud frees resources to develop and deliver new digital business and process solutions.
• Decrease time and cost to market by shifting IT funding from capital to expense budgets. Cloud provides emerging technologies and tools that further speed time to market. On-demand access to a large marketplace of metered cloud resources is the heart of agility.
• Facilitate innovation by substantially lowering the cost of experimentation and failure risks. It opens the door to low-cost trials, pilots, and other potentially high-yield approaches to new business requirements.

To deliver digitally personalized customer experiences you need to drive your cloud efforts around marketing and related business process improvements, specifically toward customer preferences expressed via social media, mobility, and location awareness.

• Shoulder the responsibility for leading your team to focus on personalized customer experiences that leverage social/preferences and mobile/location-aware improvements.
• Focus on understanding how social and mobile integrations and customizations can enhance or simplify your customer experiences. Examples include loyalty applications that remember your favorite hotel foods; or offer a free meal “on the house” if you lose at the gaming table.
• Make sure that you also mine the preferences (social) and location (mobile) information generated by your products and customers. Use this data to drive marketing. Customers willingly provide this data. Collect it, analyze, look for patterns, and empower marketing and sales and other business users to access this data. To do so you need to build this capability into your applications.
• Stay in touch with your customers, peers, and marketplace. Over time customize your features to your specific environment using the information mined from customers as well as non-customers in your marketplace.
• Put in place a cloud-first policy if you haven’t already done so. See http://blog.globalknowledge.com/technology/cloud-computing/why-cloud-first-shouldnt-scare-it/ for information on the value and use of a cloud-first policy.
• Look over your cloud plans. Be sure you're leveraging cloud computing’s features appropriately. Understand what these features are, how they produce benefits, and why those benefits are good for your firm.
• Look for where cloud features can facilitate the ease of adding or modifying business process capabilities, allowing your firm to respond quickly to opportunities and challenges in the marketplace.
• Follow the approach in Decision Brief "How to Confidently Decide to Adopt Cloud Computing."
• Get going today, work with key non-IT business areas (sales, marketing, production, operations, etc.) to identify your marketplace and understand your customer social and mobile preferences and patterns. Follow these steps to develop and capture a strong Return on Agility.