CIO Folder: Learn from the next generation

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24 September 2015

ICT has hyped its own story at so many points of paradigm shift and ‘advancements’  — meaning apparently great leaps forward — that the audience, the media and our own industry leaders are a bit jaded. Cloud is lost in its own hyper-scale fogginess and the market jet stream has broken it up into so many transient cloudlets that we might as well call it internet computing after all and bring it back down to the earth bound data centres in which it actually works.

‘Wottalot of Yottabytes we’ve got’ is already old headgear. ‘Deal with it’ is the almost universal attitude of consumers and users, who don’t much care what is stored where — or indeed how big the data is, unless it affects their own precious trivia, privacy or money. In the industry we generally share the feeling that there is so much pressure for more and more storage capability that the economic business case for R&D investment in storage technology is so strong that it it’s a non-problem… and probably the best stock market bet in ICT.

In the rapidly expanding fields of data science and analytics, the data itself is just raw material of immense potential riches. Data today is like oil or gas or minerals. The value comes when it is extracted and refined, some elements and streams are more valuable than others and you probably will not know the true market value until the final product is on the market. So the notion that we can’t store it all will become as old-fashioned as filing cabinet analogies.

“If there is just one thing we all know it is that times and technology move on. Inexorably. Yesterday’s Big Thing is today’s commonplace, which is where Big Data is headed. The Web is just 26 but that also means that most of today’s parents never knew a world without it”

Loosing sight
If there is just one thing we all know it is that times and technology move on. Inexorably. Yesterday’s Big Thing is today’s commonplace, which is where Big Data is headed. The Web is just 26 but that also means that most of today’s parents never knew a world without it. In fact we have generally lost sight or comprehension of the Internet proper because so few people deal with anything beyond the Web.

Mobile phones are of course older (some of us remember the early bricks) but today’s kids think an early iPhone is approaching senility. What they would think of my beloved Motorola StarTac I cannot imagine. As for phones or devices with cords and flexes, they are obviously for grandparents’ thingamabobs because they only understand wall sockets.

Some recent articles about what our children or grandchildren will laugh at as they reminisce in the pub (some cultural things are unlikely to change significantly) suggest that looking ahead to their looking back might hold more clues to where we are going than most other indicators. Every CIO needs to be something of a futurologist. Perhaps those with articulate millennial children or grandchildren already have a significant advantage? Whatever they say is ‘Just so silly, Daddy’ is clearly doomed.

Book survival
Real books seem to be surviving alongside ebooks. Publishers are reporting a phenomenon in that people are now buying hard copy, even hardback, books that they have already read in digital format. Print-on-demand is becoming a significant segment of the book publishing industry.

But other paper publications are well past their best before date such as transport timetables, national and regional telephone directories, and business cards.

Papers and magazines: notoriously hard to forecast for the future but a viable partnership appears to be evolving between longer life and specialist publications (TechPro, for example) and complementary online content. Daily newspapers, literally ephemeral, are more threatened by digital media while better presented publications with rich content like Wired or fashion mags or upmarket Sunday supplements are in fact holding their ground in the market.

Libraries still have a respected place, but search has largely replaced printed source research. It is now as true for academic subjects as for popular genealogy and, sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality, journalism.

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