Thursday, July 31, 2008

Technology Trends

I rediscovered an old article I had written back in 1986 and thought I would post it here. It is very similar to my first post and consists of four points.

1. Technology is not and should not be an end in itself, but should be used as an enabler to accomplish more effectively the business one is in. Technology trends that coincide with and support business trends have the best opportunity for success.

One example of this is CASE tools. CASE tools were the technology trend setter at some time in the past. Today one does not hear much about CASE tools. Why? Because the useful tools have been adopted by businesses as the more effective way to do business, hence, they have become "main stream".

Another example to watch today is JAVA and related technologies. JAVA by itself is nice, but how it will be used to make business more effective will determine its future. JAVA is just an instantiation of the underlying technology trend towards componentized software. Componentized software will have a big impact upon business as it allows one to move away from single vendor dependence towards a rapidly advancing innovative entrepreneurial development of software components which will be "plug and play."

Which brings up the next point.

2. Individual technology items are just point-in-time instantiations of an underlying technology trend. It is the trend that is important, not today's implementation of a point on that trend. By identifying and understanding the underlying trends, one can get ahead of the curve and be a leader in deploying technology enabled solutions. But, by focusing on individual expressions of the underlying trend, one is forced to compete on a "me too" basis and also suffer the possibility of choosing the wrong implementation of the technology trend.

Which leads to the third point.

3. Technology trends are build upon historical events. A certain technological infrastructure must be in place for advancement to occur. The trend we see today in communications called the World Wide Web is built upon the foundation put in place by Arpa back in the late 70s and 80s. One cannot only go backward in tracing this trend, but even in the 80s, one could move forward into the future and extrapolate where, based on various assumptions, the technology would go. The real problem is not the direction, but the speed with which certain trends develop. And this is where companies who do not try to understand underlying trends but focus on individual applications of that trend may loose out. Many companies today are scrambling to understand JAVA and the WWW. Historically, companies such as Railroads did not understand the technology trend leading to competitive forms of transportation. They thought they were in the railroad business, not understanding the technology trend which would have led them to understand that they were in the transportation business. Banks today are struggling to understand how the technology will reshape their business. The question to ask is, are they in the banking business, or some other business that the technology will enable?

Which leads to my final point.

4. The merging or crossing of trend lines leads to unexpected concepts which often make orders of magnitude leaps of productivity possible. Examples are the merging of high speed communication technology with distributed systems technology. This merger of technology trends has led to distributed client/server systems based on WWW browsers for common front-end systems tied to heterogeneous back-end systems deployed around the world. This would have been difficult to plan and deploy on its own, as global companies can testify. Today it is common place in the WWW.

Summary: By focusing on underlying technology trends in multiple disciplines one has the best chance of surviving in today’s competitive environment. Through the understanding of these underlying technology trends, one can pick and choose or develop the instantiation of those trends which give the best competitive advantage to the business at that point in time.

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