Every New Year prompts speculation about what it will bring in terms of innovation — what new inventions and developments will we see in ICT? Which is great. It maintains our curiosity and wonder and the impetus towards progress — and the new gadgets can be great fun. Will the Outlook smart watch manage our days for us? Could those big new 105” curved LED screens in super clear Ultra HD revolutionise our videoconferencing as well as our living rooms? How far are we along the way to life size realistic holographic projection? Alas, however, the average living room is a bit cramped for life size 3D rugby. On the other hand, just as in ancient Rome and other societies, perhaps architecture will start to reflect the way we live and in future a large high-ceilinged room will be surrounded by small purpose pods for sleeping or cooking or ablutions.
Innovation in business ICT, which of course includes all organisations and especially the government sector, will always be more conservative and sober-sided. On the other hand, the twittering classes and their media have been wittering on for a decade or more about so-called consumer technology and using it for work. A totally phoney distinction, many if not most business leaders will recognise, including (perhaps surprisingly to Generation Y or whatever it is now called) older heads who have seen it all before. Any ambitious or even sensible worker has happily used his or her personal kit for the job if it offered some added convenience or speed or quality, from a bicycle through a typewriter to a home computer.
The questions in business always come from the management side: what are employees allowed to use? In what circumstances? Could there be an impact on security? That is the commonest and most discussed reason for prohibition. But it has to be acknowledged that there may be other corporate inhibitions that stem more from the business culture, like allowing those junior whippersnappers to show off gadgets more advanced (and expensive) than senior management enjoy. Once upon a time a certain go-ahead insurance sales rep was refused a car allowance for his (secondhand) Jaguar because it was ‘inappropriate for his grade’. Could there be some of that begrudgery lingering still in corporate environments?
Even when the devices are supplied, like corporate laptops or even VDI, there is a challenge to central control and security. Letting the users bring/choose their own really just adds a thin further layer to be secured
But let’s stand back both from the petty and from the spurious advances that some sexy gadgets offer corporate usage. The Great Paradigm Rift started with portable computers and the Internet and the many advances since then have valuable and exciting and all the rest but nowhere near as significant. The profound transformation was that computing and its users were untethered from place. Even when portable computing was at the remote terminal level it meant you could work, even though in a limited fashion, from anywhere with a phone line. The Internet replaced point-to-point connectivity with ubiquitous service and of course the Web made it all visual and user-friendly. Once people did not have to attend a specific workplace and station to use computing, today’s world of infinite possibilities opened up. Clearly, mobile and wireless have added new dimensions and something close to universal adoption in developed societies. They have added depth and variety and opportunities for ingenuity. But smarter, newer, bigger/smaller gadgets do not a paradigm make.
That is especially true in the corporate domain, where paradigms shift more in line with business and corporate culture and practices than specific technologies. In that context, cloud computing is not such a huge step. In technology terms it is an extension of remote or server-based computing with the key difference that the user organisation does not own the kit, the infrastructure, and its ability to manage it is limited. But it is in many respects less of a corporate cultural change or challenge than, for example, traditional outsourcing. Something very similar applies to user devices. Even when the devices are supplied, like corporate laptops or even VDI, there is a challenge to central control and security. Letting the users bring/choose their own really just adds a thin further layer to be secured. The devices are still at the periphery and the organisation has to choose where to place its security defences. More and more those have retreated to a consolidated core that can be hardened to whatever degree is possible or desired. In principle the only real difference from mainframe days is that then a bug was largely accident or error while today any school kid with a week’s dojo can code malware or just buy it off an internet shelf.
So perhaps the best thing a CIO can do right now, with the century in its adolescent teens, is to stand back and try to separate the accidental from the substantial, the exciting frisson from the earth tremor, the shift from the rift in ICT paradigms. What we are calling, all too crudely, Big Data is certainly a shift, taking our 70-year plus tradition of databases and analysis into a new dimension. Today, like the real world, unstructured information is the norm. The ability to cope with it and analyse it to a decision-making level is already enormously valuable and a major step towards useful artificial intelligence. The Volume and Velocity elements of Big Data are not all that significant. They are simply challenges to our technology and being overcome by engineering.
But Variety is an infinite challenge in trying to extract meaningful and usable information. We are literally seeing a new logic evolve, based on patterns of phenomena which may be significant — or indeed may not — as opposed to traditional scientific logic which starts with the certain and builds up by principle. In many respects it begins to match the intuitive perception of human intelligence. The other V that enters the equation—or perhaps we should say ‘picture’ since we are not using hard logic—is Veracity. With multiple heterogeneous sources of data of wildly differing types, the degree of trust to be put in any of them or any combination is the real core of the challenge. This is where Data Science is about to become the key expertise.
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