I was asked about my perspective on the future of business computing for an upcoming HP article. In prepartation for the interview, I pulled together a 'stream of conciousness" set of notes that I thought I'd pass along, based on the questions that they were going to ask me. We eventually talked about a number of other areas as well, but I thought I'd pass along my notes.
1. What are the four waves of IT and what is the significance of each in terms of innovation and productivity?
The four waves perspective is based on some analysis by Forrester covering how IT technology adoption has taken place. The first wave of IT was when the mainframe came along. Before that point when you were talking about a computer, you meant a person who calculated for a living. The mainframe replaced all that and developed an enterprise view of information.
The second wave came with the arrival of the personal computer. It allowed individuals to have their own view of the corporate information and work with the data at a personal level.
The third wave was about networked computing and allowed a shared view between and across organizations. This included the dot com era.
Based on previous trends, this last wave is coming to an end and we're entering into a new wave that consists of computers in things instead "as things" -- with massively more amounts of information available about the context of the enterprise being gathered in real time. It's also about analyzing this information and moving from a latency rich "sense and response" approach, where you wait for things to happen, to a much more proactive "cause and effect" approach. You understand the underlying causes and address the resulting effect. It's an approach where you "skate to where the puck is going to be" - as Wayne Gretsky says. This will significantly change the relationship between IT and the business as a whole and the perspective of how business value is generated.
2. What is the inflection point we have entered, in terms of the coming next wave? How will the Information Technology paradigm of the past decade be disrupted?
The move to the next wave has been delayed by the current economic downturn. What this means is that, when funds start flowing again, it will be on a quite different playing field than the IT of the last decade. Technical advances were already in motion and have continued through the downturn even though organization has not had the freedom to implement them, yet. Organizations that have kept tabs and are prepared for this new approach will have a significant advantage over those who have hunkered down in survival mode during the crisis.
3. What new technologies will be driving this wave?
There are a few key business and technology threads that intersect in a new way for the next wave. First, with all the sensor techniques and new data gathering system, we're getting closer to the age of abundance of information - where we worry much less about if the information is available and much more about when and how to use it.
At the same time with multi-core processors and cloud computing techniques we've moving closer to the age of abundance of computing were we can take all that information and model, simulate and perform pattern recognition and separate ou... and have the people focus on turning the anomalies into opportunities, rather than messing around in "normal" where they'll just add variation.
On top of this we have the whole issue of presenting this information in a fashion that it can be consumed and driven to action. That means personalizing the information flow to the role, availability and responsibility of the individual, instead of treating everyone the same. This means taking advantage of our understanding of the intersection of personal context with enterprise context - essentially creating a whole new type of enterprise.
4. How must network systems and technologies evolve to cope with vast increases in data?
My personal view is that there are certain IT activities that were designed from their inception to be highly parallel in nature. They'll require streams of information (ideally in real time) to function. These will be the approaches that consume significantly more of the cloud and multi-core computing resources than the traditional computing techniques. I'm not saying that ERP systems and other traditional software will go away; I'm just saying those techniques are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to using new computing resources. We'll see them change to take greater advantage of more parallel techniques or be replaced by whole new software approaches based on modeling, simulation and pattern recognition -- similar to the way the green screens (and their applications) are now a rare site in most organizations. As new techniques are available, organizational approaches and develop new expectations.
5. Will standalone IT departments survive the fourth wave?
With any trend there are leaders and laggards. I believe that a wholly standalone IT organization will be at a significant disadvantage, since they will be fighting it out on a traditional learning curve, where other organizations using these new techniques will base their work on a learning curve that is advancing much more steeply. IT organizations need to start now to understand the opportunities for them. Start small, but still do something meaningful - otherwise no one will pay attention.
6. How should employees be transitioned into this wave?
It depends on if you mean employees who work in or with IT or IT departments. For the individual, they should familiarize themselves with the concepts of what is going on in their area. For the Microsoft oriented personnel (since that's where I focus many of my efforts) the new technologies are: Azure, Silverlight, SharePoint and SQL StreamInsight. For IT organizations, it's to develop a strategy and enterprise architect that looks for waste in the current environment by assessing the current application portfolio from a value per watt and value per effort perspective. Since most organizations have the vast majority of their funds locked up in fixed costs built up over a number of years of success, you must first focus on the fixed costs in order to have investment funds. Addressing those fixed areas should free up funds to focus on strategic activities like:
- data gathering and complex event processing
- enterprise workflow and process automation
- Virtualization and cloud computing application
- Attention engineering (ensuring the right information is delivered to the right person in the right place, in the right format, at the right time, driving the right result) maximizing the outcome while minimizing the disruption.
- Sustainability - addressing the efficiency of the enterprise as a whole as well as the IT organization.
