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Money spent on so called “shovel ready” projects implies that workers and projects are ready to go. In that spirit, it seems like most organizations have at least a few projects that are ready for the cloud. Here is a small selection of the some of best use cases that I’ve seen working with customers and other vendors:

1. Sharing files

If you needed to send a 50mb file to five people around the world, how would you do it? Seriously, think about this for a moment. How would you securely and within your organization’s governance framework share that file? The business case for replacing FTP drives and email attachments has never been stronger, based on the work and growth of organizations like Box.net. If you need to collaborate with external users, share files and documents, and break free from local file storage, cloud services are a great fit.

2. Document Automation

Do you currently use paper forms and documents in your work-flow? PDFs? Are your constantly emailing Word documents? If so, there are cloud services that can help you gather data, route documents, collect payments and signatures and integrate seamlessly with your local systems. The joy of cloud services like LincDoc is that the entire infrastructure for these projects is centrally managed and elastic, allowed you to scale up for projects with increased demand, such as quarterly statements and insurance enrollment.

3. Email and communication

The ironclad grasp of Microsoft Exchange on the enterprise is diminishing daily. If you were starting a business today for example, would you invest in servers and licenses, or sign up for a Google apps account? Organizations around the world are moving to services like Google Apps and Office 365 to liberate themselves from thick client applications and on-premise email hosting. The cloud allows for better security, access and storage—normally at a much lower cost than keeping things on your own outdated servers.

4. CRM

Excel, Outlook, Goldmine, ACT. Still using one of these? If so, I know exactly how you feel. Customer and contact management has been one of the strongest areas of ECM and CRM adoption, since having instant access to customer issues and data always leads to an improved ROI from on-premise applications. Whether you need to access data at your office or on a mobile device, cloud CRMs are plentiful and feature rich. If you are going to head down this path, I encourage you to work with a professional organization to help you manage your journey to the cloud.

So, what shovel ready cloud projects exist in your organization? If not something on this list, what else are you looking at? If you aren’t moving services to the cloud, what is holding you back? Leave a comment below and let me know.