Reportedly Bill Gates said “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” That is a very level headed observation. I think it reflects the way we humans react to technology capability growth. Think for a minute about most of the graphs you see in Ray Kurzweil presentations. Exponential growth isn’t dramatic right away, it is dramatic over time. We get our hopes up and expect wonders right away and overestimate the change that should be here short term. Then tend to be discouraged when that dramatic change isn’t here yet which makes us underestimate the power of something like a doubling of performance every year multiplied by ten years.
I think enterprise CTOs are in tough spots because they are charged with avoiding both the human faults outlined above. A CTO needs to have a balanced estimate of the change that will be here in a year or two or ten. And we need that balanced assessment across multiple sub disciplines of enterprise technology, including virtualization, cloud computing, storage, communications, middleware, development environments, etc.
I can’t say I have the magic recipe that will provide that balance. But I do have some personal predictions of change that I enjoy sharing with other technologists. I built a briefing on the future of IT several years ago to help my organization confront some brutal facts about the future. I later changed it to help us with strategic planning efforts, and over time updated it to help several decision makers noodle through the impact of some key technologies on our future.
I’ve attached a dynamic link here to the brief, please check it out and give me your thoughts. As I update that brief it will update here:
Now let me mention the big flaw in my briefing. Although it has been reviewed and commented on by some GREAT technologists around the federal community and in Silicon Valley, it really needs more eyes on it and could use more input. I think what I need to do is convert it to 100% text and then build a page on wikipedia for this topic that many hands can edit. Then we will have something that may be of more use to enterprise technologists.
But till then, please let me know if you have any suggestions for me on technologies I should be tracking, or comments on assessments I mention in the briefing.
Thanks much.
Bob
