Express challenges, not requirements

Cloud is changing everything. Cloud allows us to buy a fraction of a resource needed for a fraction of time, consume it, and return it when finished. The length of time could be in seconds, hours, days, months, or years. The beauty is that we cannot align what we need to when we need it and directly match it to a specific challenge or situation. Thinking can now shift away from acquiring solutions then mapping as many problems as we can to it, to now expressing well-defined challenges and only acquiring what is needed, when it is needed, to satisfy the challenge and be able to give it back when we are done with it, eliminating much of the cost.

Expressing challenges also improves relationships and partnerships with those wanting to help solve them. Service providers listen and respond to global market needs every day. The challenge for a service provider is trying to interpret requirements and translating them into challenges. Service providers rarely participate in conversations directly expressing client challenges. The normal conversation covers requirements, not business-focused needs. Consumers avoiding deep discussions related to their challenges may occur for many reasons: internal politics, ego, inexperience, poor planning, oversight, policies, confining processes, and so on. Service providers have learned that insightful, proactive, collaborative engagements are the most successful, with the highest levels of loyalty and commitment. Express challenges to receive insight.