Technology – Page 102

Disrupting disruptive disruption predictions

Okay, now I’m mad.

According to Gartner, in an August 2007 press release that just caught my attention, “[Research Fellow] Jackie Fenn has been authoring the hype cycle for emerging technologies for 12 years.”

This means she published the first Gartner hype cycle in August, 1996, more or less.

The Gartner hype cycle (technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, plateau of productivity) looks suspiciously like the Technology Life Cycle — Hype, Disillusionment, Application — I published in InfoWorld three months prior (“Welcome to the Technology Life Cycle,” IS Survival Guide, May 6,1996).

Coincidence? Perhaps. Still, I’d appreciate an explanation. If anyone at Gartner is enlightened enough to read KJR and cares to respond, I’ll publish the official account here.

Speaking of Gartner, one of their recent “predictions” (reported in “Most disruptive technologies,” by Clint Boulton, eWeek, undated), is that by 2026 the world will move beyond “mere semantic hypertext,” whatever that means, to a “true semantic environment.”

Eighteen years ago the NCSA had not yet developed Mosaic, the world’s first Web browser. Since I don’t recall Gartner predicting Web 2.0’s 2008 emergence back in 1990, and do recall it predicting the eventual triumph of OS/2 … well, you see the problem.

Not that this is an unsafe forecast, other than the timetable. If Moore’s law still has any meaning, by 2026 computers will be roughly 4,000 times more powerful than they are today. They’d better have mastered semantics — the difference between computers not understanding us and computers misunderstanding us. Think speech-to-text software on a very off day, only with much more severe consequences. Very disruptive.

The world will be as different from today in 2026 as today is from 1990. Semantic processing might as well get some of the credit.

Except that by then, WIFI Into the Frontal Lobes (WIFL) technology will probably have left the labs, making semantic processing irrelevant.

As long as I’m in the mood to sneer, here’s a quick critique of a few of Gartner’s other disruptive technologies:

Augmented reality, also User interface: Virtual reality with more immersive controls. Biggest immediate benefit — virtual monitors via wearable headsets mean you can use a keyboard in an airplane seat without risking a crushed LCD should the passenger in front of you suddenly recline.

Biggest disruptive impact — new, potentially deadly forms of malware. Imagine a convincing but false VR animation, shown to someone wearing a fully immersive interface, perhaps displaying an empty intersection and a green light to a pedestrian who faces heavy traffic and a Don’t Walk sign in actual reality.

Nicer disruptive impact — you point your eyeglasses-mounted camera at the person approaching you at a conference. A voice in your ear says, “It’s Jill Schwartz, the wife of John Schwartz, the CFO of XYZ Corp (your biggest client). The last time you spoke, her Chihuahua was sick.”

Context-aware computing: This might mean something but I’m not entirely sure. I think it means Microsoft Bob.

Disruptive impact — an order-of-magnitude increase in irritation as computers try to be increasingly helpful when you really don’t want them to be.

What it could be: If I type, “Bruises are black, blue and gray,” and decide to reorder the list, when I move “gray” before “blue” my word processor would automatically relocate the “and” and various commas for me.

Enterprise social software: This isn’t entirely new — telephones and e-mail are early examples.

Enterprise social software won’t be disruptive, for a simple reason. Companies that already recognize the importance of free-form communication among employees will still value it — just do it better. Companies that don’t still won’t, and won’t use it.

Multicore and hybrid servers: Gartner’s #1 disruptive technology — honest! Here’s the quote: “Programmers will have to learn parallel coding, or how to write applications for the unpredictability of machines leveraging multiple cores. In addition, more cores running more applications mean more opportunities for failure, so management specialists will have to learn how to rebuild the systems that break. Multicore will also impact the way operating systems get built.”

Yes, multicore will have an impact on the way operating systems get built. Also compilers. The impact will be to insulate programmers from having to learn parallel coding and all the rest of it.

We’ve been here before and we’ve seen the results. With the fifth repetition, prediction becomes easy.

As someone once said, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the seventh grade.

Portals, pigs, chickens, and Morey Amsterdam

The passionate middle wins.

I’m not talking about the presidential race, although we should all be so fortunate. I’m talking about PC policy. The consensus of my correspondence seems to be that to lock or unlock isn’t a binary choice. There are levels of openness. How open each system should be depends on a variety of factors, including how rigidly or openly defined the job is, the regulatory environment, and how much risk with how much impact a particular compromised system can create.

I’ve written columns about leadership, process, SOA, application methodologies, the late and unlamented network computer, and muscular client architectures vs the misnamed “thin-client” architectures.

Lots of other topics, too. Only a very few others generated as much correspondence as this series on whether to lock down or open up the desktop. Windows vs OS/2 vs Linux vs Macintosh was one (of course), religion in the workplace was another, although there are those who would say these are one subject, not two.

Certainly, how a CIO handles leadership, application architecture and methodology, and the nature of process in the enterprise has a much bigger impact on profitability. Why did PC policy generate so much more response?

The answer, I think, goes back to a point made by the column that opened this series, “The portal,” (2/25/2008): That we in IT … and many corporate executives of all stripes … have an obsolete, 1950s industrial view of employment. In this Leave It To Beaver world, work is a place people disappear to for awhile to earn a paycheck. Work/life balance means emulating the Cleavers.

Increasingly, though, work/life balance doesn’t just mean leaving the office on time so you can attend your daughter’s soccer match. It also means you experience a sense of fulfillment from achieving difficult and important accomplishments for your employer. It means you attach the same significance to friendships in the office that you attach to friendships outside of work.

Yes, that’s right. If your life is a 1950s sitcom, it’s more likely to be Dick Van Dyke, where Rob, Buddy and Sally’s work life was as real as their home lives, and got as much screen time as anything else on the show. Work/life balance? They had one life, not two. No partitions.

In 2008, you take care of personal business at the office just as you think about and solve business problems when you’re home, or out and about … and stay in touch with colleagues on these subjects during off hours. Blackberries, anyone?

Smart employers value this. It means having employees who are, to use the now-tired joke, pigs rather than chickens (the former have the bigger commitment to a bacon-and-eggs breakfast).

Employers want employees who are committed to their work. What they haven’t always done is to explore the consequences of having them.

The TANSTaaFL rule applies: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Want committed employees? Show some commitment to them. Recognize that in 2008, much more than in 1958, if you want someone to sleep in hotel rooms half the nights of the year, then maybe you should let them download music into their laptops and sync it to their MP3 players, not to mention letting them check personal e-mail.

The big work of IT … the work of implementing and supporting enterprise applications … is about supporting the company’s efforts to be more productive and efficient. It’s where profits live.

PC support is different. It is, as the name of the device implies, personal. That means it’s where IT defines its relationship with employees at all levels throughout the enterprise.

In companies that practice blanket PC lockdown neither your intentions nor the business logic matter one bit. IT runs the orphanage; employees are Oliver asking, “Please, might I have some more?”

There are, for that matter, companies where the IT staff provide no training, actively dislike power users, and prefer employees who “leave IT to the professionals.” Some advice: Arrogance isn’t a sound foundation for productive working relationships.

IT at the other extreme isn’t any better. While employees might like a wide-open environment, they won’t respect IT that provides no protection, ignores widespread software piracy, and in general shows no professionalism.

Professional IT provides training, education (not the same thing), support and encouragement. It protects the enterprise while respecting its employees and understanding their circumstances.

Why is the PC so important? Employees work in the enterprise applications you manage.

But they live in their PCs.