What goes around, comes around

August 2000

Technologies, just like everything else, have a natural lifespan. But some seem more reluctant to die than others, and some even seem to come back from the dead. Hal Harper, communications manager at PDMS, explains why...

Survival of the fittest. The Origin of the Species. Natural Selection. Evolution. Rarely in the history of academia has there been a body of theory quite so hotly disputed by the world's scientific establishment, or one that has provoked quite such universal condemnation from the Church. In fact, think of the recent furore surrounding GM foods and multiply it by a factor of ten, and you may come somewhere close to the level of commotion that Charles Darwin's work caused back in the middle of the 19th century. Not bad for a bearded techie from Shrewsbury.

Ironically however, and despite their early censure of his work, at least one of those official bodies - namely the scientific community - has since come to embrace Darwin's findings. And those same contentious theories now form one of the cornerstones of modern science - not just in nature but in the business world.

Just look at computers and computing.

In 1943 the then chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, said that he thought there was a world market "for maybe five computers". Ridiculous right? Not a mistake we'd possibly make today. You might find it surprising then that as recently as 1982, Bill Gates (yes, that Bill Gates), said of memory that, "640K really ought to be enough for anybody".

Clearly then, technology has a habit of evolving, growing and mutating into new realms of functionality, into new markets and into new areas of possibility; surprising even the most visionary among us in the process. What must be kept in mind however is that where technology differs from the natural world lies in its provenance. We don't see plants that became extinct 300 years ago suddenly reappearing stronger than ever, or animals that died out last year taking over the world the next - and yet that's exactly what seems to happen in information technology - and with alarming regularity.

Take for instance, the ways in which we choose to deploy our IT solutions.

There was a time, way back when many organisations chose to outsource their software requirements to companies that became known as bureau service providers. These bureau companies would charge monthly lease or rental fees in return for which you would receive the use of their software and their management services (such as they were).

But then, at some indeterminate point, someone decided that this model was inefficient - that it would make far more sense to give each individual user their head, to decentralise and divest control to the desktop. And so it was that the era of client/server systems architecture came to the fore and we all got our PCs.

Thus it remained until another indeterminate point a few years later - quite recently in fact - when someone else decided that those individual end users now had far too much control over their PCs, that growing PC specs and flattening organisational structures had made client/server architecture too expensive, too 'fat'. The answer? Re-centralise and put control back in the centre by outsourcing your applications and software management to something called an Application Service Provider, or ASP.

Sound familiar? History repeating itself? Absolutely.

But ironically this is where IT once again dovetails with evolutionary theory, in so much that many of its dynamics are cyclical. Just because a technology's initial incarnation has come to a natural end, doesn't mean that it won't be born again and become as appropriate or even more so at some later point.

Evolution and natural selection are then, every bit as important in IT as they are in science and perhaps more so. Through market fashions, consolidation, mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, take-overs - all commerce's equivalent of Mother Nature - the fittest solutions will survive, and those that are not so fit, won't. And in the middle of all this is you - just trying to survive the IT jungle hoping all the time that you don't get bitten by the wrong technology and end up having to replace it.

It's the classic double-edged sword. Whilst no-one wants to get caught up in the upgrade treadmill, replacing entire layers of IT investment year after year just to keep pace, it's important to realise that IT procurement and implementation are not finite. While IT is a science, it's by no means an exact one. So as much as you might try, you'll never reach a point when your IT infrastructure is 'complete' - or even nearly complete. The nature of the IT beast is that it is intrinsically transient.

The trick is not to fight this but to accept it. That way you can make the technology evolve around your business rather than your business evolving around the technology. As we discussed in last month's column, in the end technology is, or at least should be, a means to a commercial end, and once again it's all about business fundamentals.

Business too is a slave to evolution and if further proof is needed that businesses therefore need to embrace technological change rather than resist it then think of it in exactly those terms. If the fittest enterprises can be defined as those with the healthiest and most evolved strategies - not just financially and logistically - but also in IT terms, and that they will therefore survive, then it follows that those without the healthiest and most evolved strategies, will die.

And therein lies the rub. In IT just as anywhere else, evolution is not something we can choose to buy into or not buy into, it's happening all around us whether we like it or not. How will deal with that truth will define who's going to win and who's going to lose.

WS Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, once said that Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved. I wonder what he would have to say about Darwinian IT?

Published in Money Media, August 2000