by Vampire2020
As FAAG & set the pace for massive changes in information technology, IT leaders and managers struggled to keep their heads above water and the level of skill and or education kept rising. At the start of last year a tech reported
Consequently, the portfolio of emerging tech that must be managed continues to grow quickly, even as IT spending — and overall tech absorption capacity — is increasing only in the low single digits. This is an untenable proposition that’s putting more and more IT organizations under stress. Most significantly, this is creating service backlogs that are pushing “edge IT” implementation and acquisition — or systems that are not considered mission critical enterprise-wide — out into lines of business for realization as they see fit, as well as fueling so-called shadow IT projects at the departmental level.
As someone that has changed careers a number of times and naturally enjoyed learning about any new discovery or technology and earned a Graduate Certificate from University of Illinois Computer Science department in my 50’s, I thought I could keep ahead of any trend. But the rapid use of abstraction and virtualization on massive cloud-based scales, and Apple’s creating a mobile development platform starting with the iOS and iphone and iPod and then android, the potential market for an app on a handheld computer was in the billions. At the same time, what was called the Internet 2.0 or the programmable web, opened up services to other developers via simple API’s that could be mashed together to build a new service. Finally, the promise of reuse was taking hold. Although machine learning and rapid development methodologies were taught in the classes I took at the turn of the century, they were slowly adopted until the foundation for “Digital Transformation” were in place to generate huge demand from business units that have a annual challenge to lower costs or do more with less. Thus the quote above. Last year, any user could download a workflow tool that allowed you to set up triggers between social media services like blogs, photos, news, and any exposed service. For example, you can have one post trigger updates on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook pages, and log them on a google spreadsheet and send you a text to your watch.
At the time, economic and politic instability was increasing and I considered Kurtzweil’s singularity concept and the speed of change in technology was not linear but exponetial. Think back to Gore’s carbon and global temperatures hockey stick. Or better still, go bac to the the Bible’s story of David and the Egyption king asking for a chess board of rice where each new square would be double the privious. 1,2,4,8,16,32,65,128, 256, 500,1024, 2048…… Kurtzweil’s theme was that human’s do not grasp exponetial growth and so are taken by surprise by the speed of change. I have written that we are introducing changes that are as large as when man figured out how to move from animal power to machines driven by heat. burning fossil fuel allowed work to be extracted for a machine to use. That Industria revolution disrupted the world and the people in it. Charlse Dickens stories, the famous London fog was from burning coal. Child labor was brutal and power and money concentrated into the owners of capital. Workers fought for more reasonable conditions from that describe by The Jungle. We understood that although Marx description of some of the negatives of capitalism were correct, his solutions as implemented by communist countries failed. However, what did suceed was somewhere in the middle. A balance of power between owners and workers could benefit everyone.
But I want to bring in the theme of this post. There is wisdom in the old stories and myths that we would be wise to revisit. The speed at which companies are trying to implement the latest technologies reminds be fo the Tortoise and Hare. Our businesses are the Hare and although they get ahead of the tortoise, they have neglected security and the worse-case scenarios and solutions have been postponed at great cost. Companies would be wise to remember the basics like a football team has to revisit blocking and takleling fundamentals, companies quality control and security cannot be sacrificed for speed or sooner or later, disaster will strike and any gains will be lost.
Another children’s story about the boy that called wolf came to mind when “they’re coming to take our guns” was chanted for the 30th year in a row without the wolf showing up. And another Bible story with David advising the King to put away stores during good years to cover the bad years. That is not what companies did in the US with funding pension plans. They took out surpluses and spent them and then cried when the bad years came and they could not afford to make up the shortfalls. I am not a fan of Church’s and other humans determining what is truth. But, like any experienced manager will tell you, wisdom and experience through trial and fire are rarely utilized and instead dismissed as not applicable today. Like the fundemtal laws of information theory, there are some fundemental laws of living that have been passed down to us and we would be wise to stop and listen.