thoughts on changing technologies

Nicholas Carr, who a few years ago got us central IT bods all stressed out because of his HBR article ”IT Doesn’t Matter”  has a new book out that predicts the rapid end of central corporate computing departments and other predictions in “The Big Switch.”

Carr compares today’s central IT departments to the adoption of power grids in the 19th Century. At that time, factories had their own power plants with the related overcapacity and costs associated to keeping an infrastructure that wasn’t core to making cotton or beer, for example. Along came the power grid that allowed factories to focus on core activities and simply plug in for their power. Carr asserts that this is happening to corporate IT, those inefficient,  power plants that people like me run in schools and corporations. Businesses will simply plug into the Cloud and get their corporate applications from the grid. Life is good. While ordering his book online today, I had a few thoughts about my pending unemployment when the Big Switch happens. Now I don’t disagree that I’m doomed, I think the move will be a lot slower than Carr predicts.

1. Greed will make the move to ubiquitous computing incredibly slow. Those software and hardware giants in your RRSP portfolio make their money selling hardware, software and maintenance agreements. They will do what they can to keep complexity and obsolescence designed in for years to come. Further, big outsourcers prefer to run your complex, disparate applications as islands of information rather than move them all to one single source Application Service Provider (ASP.) While the Grid gang speak to the pervasiveness of Salesforce.com CRM and other applications, they haven’t proven to be big  moneymakers.
2. Organizational Inertia. Given the horrors of IT complexity, change implications and IT labour shortages, organizations have limited appetite to replace or renew their enterprise systems unless they are forced to through M&A activities. According to my earlier, wildly inaccurate predictions on the pervasiveness of enterprise applications like finance and HR run as ASPs by 2008, I’m not thinking this is just around the corner. I wish I saw complexity being reduced in our IT environments today, but this just isn’t proving to be the case.
3.  IT Security issues will slow the adoption of ubiquitous computing. While I wish it didn’t have to be this way, I believe that IT security is quickly becoming a differentiator and will be part of the brand of any successful information economy organization. Until executives and boards can trust that their constituents’ private data isn’t going to be exposed when hard-drives are carelessly disposed of, there won’t be a big appetite to move to central solutions.
4. Will you always need and rely on the grid? Look at the mess associated with today’s power grid and you can see how attractive locally produced power through cogeneration,  wind power or fuel cells will be versus  one aging, expensive unreliable grid. The upshot of this is that in the future I may want to rely on the processing power of my Nintendo Wii or the cpu in my refrigerator rather than the unreliable grid. That grid of networks provisioned by telcos is getting unreliable because of the lack of competition in the internet service provider (ISP) space over the last few years. We are currently seeing commodity internet costs flattening after falling for many years and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see costs actually climb in the next few years. The big switch requires a lot of new fibre to be installed in place of copper. This becomes a  risk if you must rely on that network for all your services.

Ok so I’m sour grapes and protectionist. While that may be the case, our IT Team will need to do more to help move the future along.

• IT must focus on the required solution versus that technocratic, not-invented-here approach to every problem that drives our constituents crazy. A secure, identity enabled, robust third party provider might actually be a better solution. At TRU, a good example of this is the leveraging of iCompass software as a service to handle some processes.
• We need to continue to enable server virtualization and open source models to increase data centre efficiencies.
• IT managers need to build “Trusted Clouds” with partner institutions and organizations. This will start small with disaster recovery initiatives between schools to shared applications and services, like BCCampus.