Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
“hey, I'm young, I exercise, I don't care about that. I'm not subject to a heart attack.”
OK, but it is one of the possibilities that new technologies offer us.
I have been in the IT industry for a little while. I did my first thesis with punched
cards on an IBM mainframe. That dates me. My second one was on a Xerox
minicomputer with punched tape instead of punched cards, it was still holes in carton
and paper. Today, like all of us, I carry a smart phone with me and I am expected to
answer within the next five minutes whatever message I get. The world has evolved.
It has evolved due to a set of technology waves. We went through the mainframe
wave. The next one was something that people called client-server. We have known
the internet, web 2.0; now people argue about web 3.0, 4.0, 5.0. Whatever the
numbers is, I do not think that is important. What is really key is this combination of
things that we are doing at the moment. I mean here the combination of mobile,
social, big data, and clouds. Aberdeen Group calls it SoMoClo. I do not know
whether you like that name, I hate it, quite frankly, because I do not think it is obvious
what it means. First of all, it is unpronounceable and secondly I do not think it means
anything but that there is something out there that is actually allowing us to take
advantage of new things. Now, all the elements that are here are not equivalent. Social
and big data are really about information and the capability of using and exploiting
information. Mobile is about how that information reaches you, the consumer of the
information, and cloud is really around the environment that makes it all happen. If
you start pulling the pieces together, you really are able to do new things, you can
start building new customer relationships, you can start setting up new business
models, you can do new products and service combinations, you can get new market
approaches and so on and so on.
Now I do not want to tell you just the theory. Let me give you a lot of examples.
But, before doing that, what is changing? Well, until now as an individual, as an
enterprise, to be able to explore IT in one way, form or fashion, you needed a “data
center”. It could be as small as a couple of PCs or a couple of servers in a cupboard
or could be as large as a couple of football fields. Part of your organization was
focused on running all that infrastructure. That is now moving away, that is moving
away because there is this feeling that somewhere in the universe there is this
unlimited capacity of infrastructure I can tap into. Now, we all know it is not
unlimited because everything is limited in the world but it is limited to such a minimal
extent that it sounds like unlimited to us, that is one piece.
And then the other piece of the equation that is sort of creeping into everything we
do is this whole concept of pay per use. Pay per use is not specific to IT. Today in
Brussels, and I am pretty sure in many other countries, if I wish, I can take a bike or a
car in a pay per use model. I was talking to an airplane engine maker, and what I did
not realize is today most airlines do not buy engines anymore, they pay per use, did
you know that? Very interesting. So, that concept is not just specific to IT but it is
also used in IT.
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