Developments in It - 2000-2008

DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 2000-2008 The epochs in the sphere of Information Technology for this past decade are notable to say the least. While some of them where ground breaking and changed the very direction of technological evolution, others are ticking along like time bombs, showing promise for future revolutions. This is a peripheral study into some of the technologies that created a stir during this period. 2000 The Millennium change that crashed the myth of Y2K established ERP as the new way of managing business. An internet company developed a well-grounded solution to mint money over the net : GOOGLE Internet as the be-all of business took a huge hit as tech stocks plummeted and sites like pets.com and chipshot.com disappeared. 2001 WEB LOGS : Internet diaries were always there, but the "era of blogs" had major implications to the field of IT connectivity. Conventional measurements of networks count nodes and bandwidth, but connectivity has at least a third dimension: adaptedness. Every object in a network has a trajectory of enhancements that allow it to work better and do more in a networked environment. One of the several ways in which connectivity is self-extending is that it provides an environment that selects for greater adaptivity to networking. As objects move down this path, as they mature, connectivity surges, even if nodes and bandwidth stay the same...which, of course, they never do. 2002 SOX : Though merely a legislation that has nothing to do directly with IT, the SOX law had major implications to the field of IT. It put data management and change management at the forefront of businesses and thereby, IT at the heart of business. VOIP : Internet was so much in demand that VOIP hit the markets with a revenge as numerous countries took up on internet telephony, VC etc 2003 Say, there are two IT objects : servers, routers, applications, operating systems, caches, etc, which needs to be interconnected. But they are incompatible, probably because they are from different manufacturers. Virtualization is the business of making a third object, B, that you slip between A and C to fool each of the original objects into thinking the other is speaking its own language, creating compatibility where before there was none. Virtualization allows you to hook anything up to anything else and force the combo to work harmoniously. Starting in 1999, a company named VMware committed itself to the technology. The early years were slow. People complained that everything had to be done twice (first by A or C and then by B), which meant that everything took twice as many cycles and burned up twice as many resources. The process added complexity. But by 2003 the world was beginning to understand how versatile and powerful a solution this was. One of signs of this dawning comprehension came at the end of 2003 when EMC, a huge storage company, bought a big piece of VMware. In 2007, VMware went public and, in a generally listless market, had the biggest tech stock debut since Google. Virtualization had arrived. 2004 ERP put to the test : Around the year 2004, the ERP hype began to be scrutinized as to its pros and cons. ERP is the art of framing a single formal definition for every object and act in a company so that everything can be managed together, top down. For instance, pre-ERP, each department or division in a company usually defined the term "employee" differently. These differences might be tacit and hard to define and perhaps not even known to top management, but they would usually matter. Once ERP came to that company, "employee" would mean the same everywhere, and every aspect of that identity would be explicit and transparent. There would be one database for the entire company and one interface to that database. A manager setting policies for "employees" would know exactly what he or she was doing. ERP is an instrument for bringing companies to a higher degree of integration. The great virtue of ERP lies in how well it supports compliance with companywide policies. A given change just radiates across the company, with every division learning about it at the same time and in the same way. In the case of Sarbanes-Oxley, which mandates a specific framework for financial reporting, ERP seems essential to getting to compliance at all. All good. However, as experience with the technology accumulated, downsides swam into view, among them a loss of flexibility and weakest-link exposure risks—if one department enters information inaccurately or imprecisely, everybody suffers. There were others. ERP is connectivity taken to the extreme; and while the program has applications that are important and useful, it also teaches that there are limits. Connectivity is not the solution to all problems. WiFi : While some technologies take the market in a single tidal wave, some others grow on it and in time encompasses the very pith of a time.