Abundance and Value from IT

[#1]

A number of years back I mentioned that the real value for business is understanding unique and separating what was abundant from what was scarce and figuring out how to take advantage of that knowledge.

I was talking with a couple of other technologists last week about my thinking on the subject and we landed on a model that looks something like this:

We have lots of areas that are significantly different and more powerful than in the past. One aspect that I hadn’t quite integrated is the concept of having unlimited applications. With SOA, SaaS and Open Source we have many more application capabilities available either as components or whole solutions. Knitting this all together to generate business value and focusing it on addressing the limited attention span of the people to make more timely decisions is where a great deal of interesting work is underway.

What have I left out that is in abundance? What is scarce that I’ve left out (besides IT $$)?

[#2]

The Agile Executive blog had a post that implies the impact of supply side economics related to Unlimited Applications.

[#3]

I think an additional unlimited item might be threats to IT Security since these are essentially unlimited in terms of variety and potential frequency.  Adding IT threats to the model could help put security into the context of this diagram, identify specific threat examples as well as steps that can be taken to defend IT assets as much as possible.

[#4]

You have a very good point. The costs for attack is very low, yet the cost for defense is high.

I even did a post about a presentation on the topic of the growth of security risk.

Thanks for reminding me.