Authors: Mike West, Bruce Guptill

There is no shortage today of models for positioning and considering IT providers. Some are very well-known and widely used. Most map a provider’s vision against its perceived ability to execute upon that vision.

This way of viewing a market space says nothing at all about how well-considered and/or well-managed are the risk mitigation elements of the solution, nor how well a technology solution can deliver reward, or business value, to the buyer as an investment over time.

Cloud-positioned and Cloud-enabled capabilities are completely and fundamentally changing what IT is acquired, what it costs, how it is acquired, how it is used, and by whom. This transformation, toward what Saugatuck calls the Boundary-free Enterprise™, requires having the ability to assess and compare the relative Risk and Reward of selecting and using providers and their offerings, rather than technological capabilities or providers’ visions of markets and users.

This report looks at how the Cloud is breaking down traditional business and IT boundaries, making traditional IT assessment and management methods inadequate, and driving a rapidly-increasing need for means to visualize and assess relative risk and reward of different solutions and providers. We introduce Saugatuck’s new Master Architecture for the Boundary-free Enterprise™ to illustrate this, then use that as the foundation on which we build and explain our Risk/Reward Assessment model and methodology.

In the end, what matters is how much Risk an enterprise is willing to gamble in order to receive a certain level of business Reward. Without a useful means of illustrating and comparing Risk and Reward, even this basic business decision is impractical at best.

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