The Instant-On Enterprise and Its Enemy -- Latency

[#1]

One of the areas I’ve talked about before is the desire to minimize “time to decision” by using technology more efficiently to recognize patterns and turn anomalies into opportunities. As we come out of this downturn the kind of IT organizations need to invest in has changed. The new technical capabilities and their ability to reduce the time to decision is being constrained by the inertia in our ability to understand the size and implications of the shifts that are underway.

It is clear that business models are changing as we move into this everything as a service mode of operation. Recognizing what services are needed, how we can get them on-line more quickly and how manage and use the information flow across the services are all turning into core competencies for IT organizations. As more computing devices are in the field and we’re interacting with them in a 24x7 fashion, whole new levels of expectation are being developed. Yet we need to support the conflicting needs of the different types of workers and demographics.

HP announces today its structured approach to addressing these issues called the “Instant-On Enterprise”.

The focus of this effort is to address the business needs of:

• Innovation
• Agility
• Optimization
• Risk management

Using the technologies capabilities to deliver:

• Flexibility
• Automation
• Security
• Insight and Visibility
• Speed

Over the next couple of days I’ll post about my perspective on what’s stopping IT from meeting these shift and what can be done about it. I’ll also mention some of the HP initiatives that are targeted at addressing these issues. This may be a bit more HP offering oriented than my usual posts, but since you are going to be hearing about instant-on from HP for the coming months, I thought I’d get my perspective in early.

[#2]

Good point about pattern recogition and latency. In so many contexts, latency and pattern recognition go hand-in-hand. We find this in legacy application source code analysis. Very often the patterns in legacy source code go undetected and opportunities are missed. So pattern recognition is often our number one tool.  

[#3]

I wasn't thinking about pattern recognition in the code that supports business when I wrote that. I was thinking more about the patterns in data and its transportation, but you are definitely correct. The whole concept of macros and code widgets is based on having easy access to tasks that are performed repetitively. Unfortunately, over the life of a software portfolio, these repetitive tasks are often lost and redeveloped -- with varying degrees of quality. As code is re-architected and re-engineered, many of these patterns will be recognized and salvaged, lowering the cost of on-going support.