May I have your views on the future of IT?

April 16, 2009 By BobGourley

If all goes well I’ll get a speaking part at the next DoDIIS Worldwide Conference at Orlando 17-21 May 2009. I love this conference. It is attended by great folks, many of whom are technologists with a deep background in a favorite mission area. The greatest systems integrators come to the conference. And the technology companies that exhibit at the conference are also great, with many demonstrating cutting edge, disruptive technologies that make for an intellectually stimulating time.

I submitted a proposal to deliver a presentation at a breakout session on megatrends in the IT world and some assessments on the future of IT. My thesis is that assessments on the future of technology can contribute to sound decisions today. Since it is a DoDIIS conference I’ll try to keep that focused on the future of IT relevant to DoDIIS. Since I’ve been keeping a briefing up on that topic for a while I think I should be able to pull together a relevant talk that should provide good food for thought.

But here is the hard part. This is the sort of briefing that is out of date the instant it is printed. It is always in need of a tech refresh.

So, I have a favor to ask. Can I ask your views on the topic of the future of enterprise IT?

Please take a look at the slides below. And send me a note with any feedback, pointers or criticisms. I would really appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks,
Bob

090413_the_future_of_IT

[Note: This was just updated to fix a broken link]

Bob Gourley

Eric, Thanks much for all those comments, I really appreciate them. I especially like the point about sorting company names by market cap. You are so right about that. Bob

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Eric

ppt 23 `Rise WEB 2.0` `All the big IT firms are moving into the Web2.0 world, including: why the given order, it appears random ?! *idea* sort order by Market Cap BN[implies R+D budget, market longevity/endurance] Microsoft 177 IBM 137 CISCO 112 Oracle 96 HP 86 EMC 24 Adobe 14 SUN 3

Brian, I'm sorry, that link was broken in my recent migration. I've fixed that now. Thanks for pointing that out. Bob

BrianWeyrauch

When I click on the link 090413_The_Future_of_IT.pdf my browser is redirected to the main page with a "nothing found" message. Can you help me out with that? Thanks!

Bob

Joemaz- thanks for the comments. I pushed back a little bit on your open source comments in another post (at http://www.ctovision.com/2009/04/the-number-one-r... But here you phrased things slightly differently and we can probably use this as a reason to clarify things. I never tried to define open. I expressed a definition of open source software, not all things "open". You can have an open management style, an open door policy, an open architecture, and open API's, and all those are good. And all those start with the same great mindset of open source software. But open source software is something that comes with an open source software license approved by the open source initiative (OSI). Open source software is about peer review and transparency. So if you have company folks who say open standards and open source are the same, please point them to opensource.org. Anyway, I agree with you regarding security. This stuff is more secure. And I strongly agree that commercially supported open source software is generally the better way to go. Cheers, Bob

Joseph M. Mazzafro

Mazzafro's Law: All Bandwidth will be used Bob, presentation hits my two mega trends: data convergence and cloud computing. This drives two impacts: (1) governance and management of IT, and (2) data center consolidation. I believe your view on open software is far to binary. First your slides are miss leading in that don't tell us about the security vulnerabilities of Windows and Oracle DB compared to their deployment. Then some would disagree with your definition of open. Oracle says its DB SW is open as in it will work with all other "open standards" software. I'll just skip over the infra-structure advantages of commercial open source software like MS and Oracle sell and go right to security. I get that openness leads to better security over time as the user community will find and fix defects (though if you want Linux patches immediately you might want to consider Oracle Unbreakable Linux), but what about the adversary who develops maleware from the open environment and keeps in the "war reserve mode (warm)" until it wants an effect? To summarize I am not are arguing agains open source SW as you define it, but suggesting there are places and uses where open source makes sense and others (far more in the IC) were commerically open SW is the better approach joemaz

Dear Bob, Thank you kindly for your guidance and insight. A few questions/ideas regarding your slides: a) ppt 15 Why the term `Accelerate`, what is benefit +or virtue of acceleration on Next-Generation Platforms. Perhaps you mean evolving with today`s science in academia+industry as market changes from season-to-season. Here in US, every 18months seems to ushers a -new dawn- of ~creative destruction~. Perhaps your meaning on this slide it that TODAYS Changes are epoch in scale and transformational from NATION vs NATION, as currencies-economies-technology innovation collides in globalization. b) ppt 5 *idea* `Part One` Epoch Change [NATIONAL CONSEQUENCES] c) ppt 11, `High Risk DB Vulnerabilities over last 3 years` ... what is source, context of these statistics, esp. Oracle DB Stats. d) ppt 18, *idea* Data Mining -> Predictive Technologies [ie. exponential curve of data-growth+storage, predictive technologies will mature and increasingly model probability patterns. e) ppt 23 *idea* MindMap of WEB 2.0 to include `REFLEXIVITY` [Theory of Human innate human-err, populations make mistakes, online expression has -some quotient of err- ... beware] f) ppt 24, 4th bullet, predictive g) ppt 25, `270 TB of NTM `daily` ?!

The first version of this had permissions set wrong on the embedded slide deck. Sorry about that!

May I have your views on the future of IT?

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