Heath Brownsworth

There is no denying that Amazon Web Services’ lastest offering, DynamoDB, is super cool and holds great promise in resolving the database bottleneck that has plagued many applications and implementations running in the cloud. But is technological inovation enough to ensure Amazon’s future, or the future of the cloud for that matter? With the recent release of the 2012 edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer, the answer would appear to be “no”.

The Edelman Trust Barometer is an annual survey conducted by research firm StrategyOne that seeks to examine trust in four key institutions: government, business, media and NGOs (non-governmental organizations). The 2012 report indicates that product and technical innovation alone are no longer enough to win trust, or translated in the case of business, revenue. The report draws several important conclusions, including that “engagement-oriented behaviors that are more societal in nature, such as treating employees well, putting customers ahead of prof- its, and transparency, are vital to building future trust”.

This should be concerning to all companies, but particularly companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook that have won legions of customers based upon their products and technology. We are already starting to see these ‘societal’  attributes of trust come into play as concerns continue to mount over worker treatment and working conditions at Foxconn, a Taiwanese company with manufacturing facilities in China that produces the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360. With concern over how tangible products are made already at our doorstep, concern over how intangible services, such as the cloud, are produced is right around the corner.

So while technical inovation is driving cloud growth and cloud adoption, we cannot lose sight of the fact that people matter. In fact in a world where technology is increasingly desensitizing us of our humanity, people matter more than ever.

Heath-

(Cross-posted @ Skywriting)