Back to the Future With IT

In the movie series Back to the Future, Marty McFly jumps back and forth through time in an awesome time-traveling DeLorean to save his existence and others near him. Throughout the movie series, especially the second which takes place in 2015, we get to see a variety of fun and imaginative guesses as to what our world will be in the future. The movie included things like suspended animation kennels, holographic movie theaters, chiropractic hoverbelts, and more. One of my favorites was the sunglasses that were small, portable personal phones. I'm wondering when I'll be able to buy a pair.

The movie reminded me of the evolution of information technology (IT) and how much it's changed over the years. In 1945, a draft report on the EDVAC was written describing the concept of a stored program and is the blueprint for computer architecture to this day. When I first graduated college, mainframes were still heavily used and all the computing power was centralized in the data center. (Gee, isn't that similar to cloud computing?)

Within a year of starting my job, I was fortunate to stumble into one of the first local area networks at Exxon which took advantage of yet another IT breakthrough-Ethernet. While Ethernet was invented at Xerox in 1973, it took many years for it to be widely adopted. About the same time I was rolling out a LAN at Exxon in 1989, across the Atlantic Ocean at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee shared a document entitled, "Information Management: A Proposal" which outlined a global hypertext system (a.k.a., the World Wide Web). Travel forward 25 years and my how things have changed!

I recently had the privilege to hear futurist Mark Goodman (you can check him out on YouTube) talk about the explosive development of information technology. He goes on to explain the concept of accelerating returns and how it applies to IT. The example he used: A picture of Apollo 11 and an iPhone. What's the common link? There are more computing cycles in an iPhone today than were available to all of NASA at the time of the Apollo space launch. Each year, computing capabilities double, and then double again, and then double again, and so on. Just imagine what your iPhone or Droid will be in 20 to 30 years. It seems unfathomable to me.

So, what does all this mean to you and me today? Information technology is changing and as business people, we need to leverage it to its fullest potential. In particular, the cloud computing trend has brought many benefits to businesses that simply were out of reach 5-10 years ago. Benefits such as bullet-proof data center technology, access from anywhere, anytime and more. It's imperative to keep yourself abreast of these changes in IT and adjust your technology strategies to achieve your business goals.

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