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All things interconnected

Network, don't fail me now!

Everything in IT depends on the network.--and not just in an abstract, "need it occasionally" sort of way. The packets must flow for virtually every operation, every job, every transaction. Whenever packets drop, or links go down, we're disconnected and isolated. Information doesn't flow; apps don't work; users don't proceed. We need the network up and running, millisecond by millisecond, every millisecond of every day.

Our utter, urgent dependency won't lessen in the coming years. It will intensify--redoubling and redoubling again. Cisco calls its vision of the future "together." HP … Read more

IT's new age of possibility

It's only been around about 50 years, but information technology has already affected almost the entire landscape of human activity. How science is pursued, how products are designed, how commerce and supply chains work, how businesses are run, how human beings communicate with one another--there's almost no arena in which IT isn't a critical enabler.

Given this, it may sound peevish to say IT has, at the same time, been hide-bound and conventional. But IT has been conventional. Oh, sure. We've had our moments--modernizing supply chains starting in the 1970s, the PC and distributed computing blooms … Read more

Office applications: Still your father's Oldsmobile

It's 2010. The Internet is pervasive and mobile. Business processes, supply chains, and financial markets are globally connected and electronically executed. There are no flying cars, but in many other ways, the future has arrived. Yet when we look at the tools and processes organizations use to create and update documents--the lifeblood for business processes--they're straight out of the 1990s playbook. The world's changed, but the office applications most in use today--our word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs--basically have the same priorities and follow the same strategies they did two decades ago.

Sure, today's office apps … Read more

2010 will be a wild ride for IT

This year is going to be amazingly full of change in IT. "Ennnh, IT sees a lot of change every year," you say? Yes, fine and true. But not like this one. Not at this magnitude. Consider:

Virtualization is being taken up at such a pace that it's hard to find a metaphor to describe it. "Exploding" has a pieces-coming-apart-at-high-speed vibe, when in fact virtualization's pieces are all coming together. "Imploding" doesn't work either. We've had maybe five years of fast growth, but now it's mainstream and ready for … Read more