“Information Technology” is such a dumb turn of phrase. Information Technology has many things wrong with it, the least of which is that there is nothing inherently new or esoteric about information. As long as we are human, information and information processing, is a basic process the same in kind as biomass processing and pneumo-processing. We survive on information. To ignore that basic fact when beginning any conversation about IT is simply foolish.
“Information Technology” is a horrid catch-all term into which any artifact for capturing and storing sensory input or mental output can fall, if one desires. The common trend seems to be towards only including universal Turing machines using the von Neumann architecture, the communication networks between such machines, their programmed behaviors, and their input/output systems. This excludes writing, printing, visual modes of communication such as drawing or painting, performance, the totality of wired analog voice systems, and motion pictures. All of the proceeding are inherently information artifacts, which implies that to be “Information Technology” an artifact must be perceived to have some characteristic that makes is technological. Whatever particular form that characteristic takes, it embodies one or both of the following – newness and mystery. Programmable computers and the networks that they comprise are new. They have only existed since the 1950’s and only since about 1994-95 has the inter-networked micro-computer been a mainstream gadget for general automation of menial tasks.
Additionally, this new gadget remains mysterious. This mystery is in part from the relative youth of common usage and in part from the enormous complexity of the inter-networked / von Nuemann architecture, which separates hardware, software, and connectivity into strongly bounded specialized fields of expertise, each of which is beyond the grasp of the average person’s comprehension if they were inclined to attempt to understand. Most are not.
The marketplace has spoken and it desires to not know the complexities of how and why these three complex disciplines interact, they simply want them to do so with the reliability of electricity or refrigeration. The world does not want to be users of technology, they wish to be consumers of utility. Let the hacker sub-culture keep their esoteric knowledge and their jargon, the market wants stable, reliable, and simple utility that integrates itself into their lives transparently. Yes, when it fails it will be noticeable, just like electricity and refrigeration, but it should fail infrequently and between failures it is an affordable commodity.
The sooner organizations come to terms with their feelings about so-called Information Technology, the sooner hackers and entrepreneurs will begin to produce “Information Utilities” and commoditize the component parts of large-scale systems needed to arrive at this new destination. Many organizations are presently imprisoned in endless cycles of hardware, software, and network upgrades because the derivative effect of a Technology Paradigm which states that solutions are singular and isolated from one another, and that today’s solutions have nothing to do with tomorrows problems. This simply ignores the nature of information. Information flows, beginning with collections of data, aggregating, organizing, and filtering as it is interacted with by external agents (the consumers of the information). Information is not a series of discrete particulars, it is a comprehensive unity, a continuum which must be dealt with as a continuum, not as points.
Today’s typical Enterprise Resource Planning package, productivity suite, web experience, or operating system does not function well in a dynamic, fluid information-space because it was designed to reside in a tightly constrained, compartmentalized environment derived from organizational needs being enunciated without any contextual integration to the on-going, progressive needs of the organization. Engineers and hackers are, by and large, exceptionally talented at solving particular problems. This localized immediate solution methodology of designing bounded software (and this is principally in software but can be found in hardware and connectivity as well) is well suited to the business of selling solutions, as it never addresses the root issue, and profits from the persistence of new problems or new desires which can be fixed with new features. It also neglects the actual purpose of the organization buying the solution and the culture of internal beliefs, processes, values, and needs by selling one-size fits all applications that then must be “tailored” to meet the needs of the customer. In the end, the customer spends mightily for a product certainly solves the problem it is asked to solve, but which may or may not fit well with the rest of the solutions to the rest of the problems they must deal with on a daily basis. Poor decisions like this are, I think, a clear sign of an organization grasping for identity and believes technology will glaze over the faults that an insufficient sense of self-knowledge creates.
By contrast, the Utility Paradigm is process-oriented. It requires a preexisting corpus of core-values, ethos, identity, and purpose to feed the derivation of requirements for an intelligent journey into information tool purchasing. When you get electricity you assume that you will get as much as you need, when you need it, on-demand. Likewise, refrigeration brings with it certain assumptions about the persistent nature of the provision of coldness. Utility is progressive, not a one-time thing.
Information utility is the ability to compile available data on-demand at the consumer level. Data aggregation, filtering, and visualization cannot require specialized intermediaries for the hardware, the software, or the connectivity between the source of the data and the consumption of the information. Organizations committed to employing the information utility paradigm don’t have departments of specialists to support knowledge-workers (the Information Age equivalent to the wage-slave). Nor do they have more computing power than they need because the vendor of a particular application forces them to upgrade to new desktops and that power doesn’t sit idle 18 hours a day when the office is closed. These organizations determine their own course of action for hardware, software, and network upgrades – not the vendors and “service” providers.