Flickr Photo: akakumoYesterday, I had the privilege of sharing the stage at an event on cloud computing hosted by the Salesforce.com/Foundation, Facebook, and Google. My job was to set the stage for the day and talk about why cloud computing is important for our sector. (If you want the slides, I put them up on slideshare, so free to download them.)

Though I think the cloud presents its own set of challenges for our sector, I also think it presents us with some amazing opportunities -- not just to save money on infrastructure and IT support, but to go about our work differently than we have before.  

I'll confess that I owe the genesis of my thinking around this to Steve Wright at the Saleforce.com/Foundation. I had the chance to interview him about his upcoming NTC session, and that set me to thinking about just what we COULD do with the cloud if we were able to look beyond the bottom line. 

What that is, I think, is collaboration and evaluation, facilitated by free-moving data.

You've noticed this, I'm sure. In the last decade, the pile of data we have to sift through to make decisions has grown from a molehill into a mountain. As communication and interaction have moved from analog to digital, we're able to capture more information than anyone thought possible. 

Think about it. If you ran a phone bank in the early 90's, the only way you had to guage whether or not your message was effective was to count the number of hang-ups. Now we send out an email and not only know whether or not folks took action for us, but which part of the message compelled them to click, and which parts of our list found the message most compelling. And we can know dozens of other things as our databases record those clicks. (This example is inspired by The Numerati. Buy it.)

Making sense of all this data is going to be our key challenge as a sector as we move forward. But the cloud is going to help us in this regard, because the cloud makes it exponentially easier for us to move data around. 

In the cloud, we can share client service data with other organizations and map it against the need demonstrated by census data. In the cloud, we can create visualizations of our data that make those multi-colored spreadsheets finally make REAL sense. In the cloud, we'll be able to record even more of the ways our constituents interact with us, and interpret what that means. 

That's the promise of the cloud. Now all we have to do is live up to it. 

Also - I have to mention that there were some great panelists with some really cool insights to share at this event.  Some of my favorite tidbits came from Scott Beale, Jake Brewer and Judi Sohn.  They all had great real-life examples of the challenges and joys of the cloud. 

My favorite advice of the day came from Judi who was addressing how difficult it is to get end users to switch to the cloud when they are used to, say, Outlook.  Judi's really smart advice?  Smart by moving the data to the applications they already use.  Pop your gmail to Outlook.  And, as users have questions or needs, point them to the cloud for answers.  Eventually, they will give up their software for the cloud.