Again, buzzwords and whatever get's money in the bank is what leads tech development. Which is probably why we have stagnated on new, radical ideas or at least they are not nearly enough getting awareness.
We don't need new radical ideas. Almost nothing in IT has been new for the past 30 year (Exception - Blockchain)
We do prioritise badly. We don't acknowledged real problems. We do consistently pour dev money into scam technologies. We do run around in circles pretending we haven't been here before (like the article mentions)
It's the same as any industry. Like quack medicine, and real medicine which is mostly wrong. But IT should have the ability fix itself at a faster rate.
Come to think of it maybe we haven't stagnated and in fact are a little overzealous with the creation of a new "language/tech/platform" every week that is going to beat [insert perfectly fine dev language].
Just the fact that a blockchain doesn't scale in an obviously good way is probably part of what confused people into not inventing it sooner. Surely if total storage requirement increases without bound, it can't possibly run forever! Well, humanity won't run forever either. It just has to last long enough to be useful while it exists.
eermm !
- iPhones came out in 2007 and it took maybe 5 years for mass adoption of mobile devices to do work tasks (see iPads in bank branches as an example). This is new.
- This year the workforce in much of the world has gone from 90% in the office to 99% at home. This is new.
- Data bases have gone from 10's MB to 1000's of GB, and from scores of tables to tens of thousands of tables.
- Cloud computing; when was it that your company outsourced it's entire IT infrastructure? I bet it wasn't 30 years ago!
- Outsourcing itself, 30 years ago very few people had lumps of their IT done by SI's, this is a huge change that everyone has just got used to.
- Security and tfa and firewalls and all that jazz: 30 years ago this was all terribly naive and often implemented with airgaps. I remember one project doing billing automation at a power utility where we installed networking, workstations (in branches) and built a completely independent network out from the mainframes. It did not touch the internet, sign on was via user name and password only with no changing policy. I don't even remember seeing a security policy!
- End user consumption; this is big. 30 years ago the c-suite never saw emails. Their secretaries printed them out. Execs didn't type, or look at screens. There was a weekly report and it was given out on friday, reviewed at the weekend and discussed / actioned monday morning. Now every exec has a notebook, and a phone (see above) they want dashboards, they want to explore the data themselves - and they do do that (often badly). Their level of interaction and requirement from IT is orders of magnitude different from 30 years ago.
- Lack of cash. Every company outside China with the exception of FAANGS has had the cash squeezed out of it by investors in the last 30 years. 30 years ago utilities and investment companies sat on what (in hindsight) were rivers of cash. Funding was so heavy that there were special offices set up to oversee it's dispersal (who else remembers central program offices?) Now projects are managed in line and are part of 0 build budgets (start every year with everyone on 0 budget and make them make the case to add $1 at a time). It is incredible to think of how we used to act in projects and how empowering and facilitating of progress and quality it was - but also how expensive. People would think nothing of spending 10 or 20 times their yearly salary on machines and software - there was no motivation to imagine what else could be done with the cash! Of course all that spending floated great chunks of the economy along with the spend going into other peoples pockets. It was another world.
A remote workforce uses Skype, a laptop and the internet. As far as I can tell these have been around for years.
Cloud computing is marketing lingo for shared servers OR if you have the budget your own dedicated server. Nothing new by any means.
It sounds like you agree with my realization which is that we need to get the most out of the existing tech rather than moving onto something new and shiny.
Cloud computing isn't just shared servers - it's a shared application infrastructure. It's extremely different from the old mainframe model.
I have to say I do think that operations could be better without new silver bullets, but the scale and pressures on IT and business operations in general are dragging them to a precipice. Things are now so complex and demanding that at some point we may well see major organisations fray and disintegrate because they just can't run themselves anymore. Something close happened with the cyber attacks on Maersk and the NHS a few years ago - but from what I've seen it's quite possible that someone big will get themselves into such a tangle that they suffer a complete operational breakdown without an attack.
From the way the UK has been handling basic aspects of IT such as the spreadsheet that ran out of rows and missed a lot of Covid tracking data, the basics are yet to be figured out.