Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Need for Control and Autonomy

The need for control is a basic human requirement that can literally mean the difference between life and death. The absence of control is helplessness, which can cause stress and depression. This need is so basic that it isn’t restricted to humans: In a classic psychological experiment, dogs exhibited “learned helplessness” and refused to jump over a low wall to avoid pain because they didn’t think that they could.20

The loss of control impacts us at a fundamental emotional and physiological level. As Amy Arnsten, a professor of neurobiology at Yale, said, “The loss of prefrontal function only occurs when we feel out of control.. . . Even if we have the illusion that we are in control, our cognitive functions are preserved.”21 But without at least the illusion of control, we become seriously unable to function.

Engaging your employees may provide a greater perception—and perhaps reality—of control and autonomy than the use of a service provider. Use of cloud services, however, may provide a greater degree of control than use of your own IT organization. After all, cloud providers will allow you to instantly provision and deprovision resources, build applications, and utilize services—all without those pesky corporate approval processes and IT budgeting.

A variety of characteristics can enhance the perception and reality of control. Control begins with visibility and transparency. Leading providers offer a high degree of transparency, with real-time ...