Technology is What's Stalling Tech Innovation
Posted by Jeff Papows on Wed, Aug 18, 2010 @ 02:51 PM
A quick scan around our homes and offices reminds us of the great strides the IT industry has made in recent years. From clothes dryers that automatically know when to power down to protect the energy grid to the ability to connect remote countries to the Internet, there's a seemingly unlimited potential to what we can achieve individually and collectively through technology. From the outside looking in, we don't lack for technology innovation; yet from the inside looking out, there are several stumbling blocks that are disrupting progress.
And they're not the obvious issues such as the recession hangover or less venture capital funding. The irony is that technology itself is holding back the technology industry. This is because the more technology we create, the more issues that arise in developing and managing it.
Further, the more connected we are to each other through the Internet, the more those issues will grow because they are no longer isolated to an individual computer or mobile device.
These issues will only become more widespread when you consider that IBM estimates that by year end 2010, there will be one trillion devices including cars, appliances, cameras, roadways and pipelines connected to the Internet and an estimated two billion people on the Web by 2011.
If not properly managed, the result of these massive amounts of technology will be the proliferation of glitches that halt business. Many of these are everyday annoyances such as the inability to access funds at an ATM, flight delays and cash register errors. Others are detrimental to the health of people and businesses such as cyber attacks that infiltrate our energy and water supplies, government data theft and radiation treatments for cancer patients gone awry.
Overall, these obstacles to productivity are indicators that there are holes in the IT infrastructure that leave businesses and consumers vulnerable. The cause of them varies yet a fair amount of them boil down to simple errors that are made in the software development process that aren't caught before the product is shipped and shared across a company or the Internet.
None of these issues are new to the IT industry though managing the complexity behind them is becoming increasingly more challenging. This is especially true when you consider that the undergraduate population of computer science majors plummeted after the dotcom collapse and that demographic is only now starting to be replenished. Adding to this are a retiring population of experts who are responsible for managing the mainframes that run nearly 70 percent of the world's financial transactions. Those experts are not easily replaced because few college curriculums offer the required courses and students aren't as likely to enroll in them because the jobs available after graduation aren't considered as interesting or lucrative as other IT positions.
Yet there are steps that businesses can take now to help reduce the amount and extent of these glitches. Three of these include:
- Create a Center of Excellence (COE): that includes a representative from each department including senior management. The COE is responsible for establishing best practices and processes that are followed by the software development team so that there is less vulnerability in the infrastructure.
- Policy Enforcement: establish metrics and barriers that don't allow software to progress through its traditional development cycle unless it meets the established criteria for quality.
- Cross Train: break down job silos and cross-train software developers so that there isn't an uneven balance of critical skills.
Of course, we can't eliminate all of the issues that will inevitably arise from the ubiquity of technology. Yet with a more focused approach on the way that software is developed from the very first keystroke, we can avoid a lot of the expenses associated with fixing these issues after the fact and trying to win back the trust of customers.