Sunday, October 13, 2013

Has IT world really reached a global consensus design?

At the Akamai annual meeting, FedEx CIO Rob Carter gave an engaging talk on the role of IT in a global business.  Three aspects of that talk stuck with me, two of which explain themselves and the other being worth some exposition:
  • (Paraphrasing) "The organization's philosophical approach to the management of business is encapsulated in the operational processes they use to carry out their business."  This topic deserves its own discussion space.
  • (Again paraphrasing) - Founder Fred Smith's observation that "the information about the package is more important than the package itself". Anybody who has ever had an airline lose a bag get this: it doesn't really matter whether the bag is safe or not if the airline cannot find it.  I've lived that nightmare, and the hassle was far  more than the value of the package.
  • Dominant design.
What is Dominant Design?  When all else fails, consult Wikipedia.  Here's the layman's version.  At some point emerging industry leaders with different solutions gradually get winnowed down through a market process based on choice and/or cost.  At that point, suddenly a single solution-type is discovered to have become the norm.  The previous solution-differentiated market leaders dissolve and the new market leaders become those that are using the new norm, with the providers who delivered that norm in the first place usually (but not always, see "Tandy" and IBM) dominating that clique.

Mr. Carter believes that the IT market, at least at the level of being a global info-structure, has reached that point of enduring paradigm for each of the major layers of the architecture:

  • Servers and calculation engines, and their underlying processors, have obeyed Moore's Law since 1975.  The geometric effect seems impossible to continue, yet it does.  Actual circuits continue towards nanoscale. With virtualization we have worked out how to scale without buying more boxes.
  • Network Fabric (WAN and LAN) presents the illusion of an alphabet soup of supported protocols but the reality is that TCP/IP is the pervasive standard.  As far as carrying capacity, it has been very little time since DSL replaced phone modems; now we expect 1Gb (and growing); the Moore's Law curve seems to apply in this space also.
  • Storage is another area showing exponential yet stable growth, with the original concept of transient memory being steadily eclipsed by persistent memory.  This was an area that seemed to have issues (cost, speed, size) not so long ago, but now pervasive memory technology appears to have crossed the bridge.  This area is also exhibiting Moore's Law behavior.  It's DC so not everybody is allowed to carry USB drives (ahem) but look at the SD cards everybody is buying for their smart phones as Exhibit A! 
  • Software is moving away from last decade's focus on application rationalization (portfolio management) to a general acceptance of application stores and SaaS.  Buy what you want or just rent it for a while; the "build" option is finally being seen as the approach of last resort.

His premises seem unarguable in the short term.  For the middle term, I have to wonder whether it is possible that the changes still to come can be just as creative as those we have witnessed over the past 25 years.  If they are, then these technical approaches too will one day seem as ludicrous as the 8-track cassette.

Your thoughts?  Are we there yet?

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