JFGI - Just Fluently Globalise It

Inspired by Wayne Horkan's blog series on automated provisioning and triggered by Andrew McAfee's blog on the future I'm wondering what's happened to the initial cheery mood around automated provisioning
And what is it called anyway? Automated provisioning gets 300K hits on Google, automatic provisioning gets twice as much. I prefer the first one though, as nothing in this life is automatic

Can you cloudsource your IT if it isn't ready for automated provisioning? I don't think so, as the whole point of Clouds seems to be the great flexibility in up- or down scaling 'your stuff': SAN, NAS, OS, DB, apps, The Works

I think we've missed a crucial point in IT. There is no "the solution" for anything, and we should know that by now.
Is RAD or IAD better than LAD? It all depends on the quality and granularity of your design, no matter how you do it. If problems and issues are put forward to the development or even testing phase, you still have to solve them but just at a (far) greater cost. Is XP better?
Is SAP the solution, or Oracle?
Is outsourcing the solution? Is offshoring? I'm reluctant to call my company's helpdesk these days because it's been offshored. They trained all the people to speak Dutch (which they do very well!) but it takes me more time to explain my problem - the cost has shifted off the company's balance to my project's balance.

There is no such thing as one-size-fits-all. ESB is not the solution, nor is SOA, nor is anything else. And Cloud computing without automated provisioning is simply a very bad idea

But it is wise to take your entire enterprise IT-landscape, and see how diverse and dynamic it is. Not only for now, but also for the near and distant future. Not only on the inside, but also from the outside. B2B, B2C, how well does it fit on the Global Service Bus (the web)?

So, in essence, there isn't a one-size-fits-all, but maybe a one-approach-fits-all: globalise. Toss it all out there, all together now, and see what we end up with. We have to standardise, standardise, and standardise for many, many reasons. And we can't begin to standardise unless we have an overview of all the diversity in the world

Currently, only gas, water and electricity are automated provisioned to all our different homes because they are extremely standardised, highly well-defined, and boringly static products. If we want at least part of IT to be able to follow suit, that would mean that our apps would fit the above description... duller than dull!

And always, there will be an entire iceberg below that doesn't fit that description - that's just evolution. And as long as we don't cooperate, we will never break the 10-90 equation of the iceberg