Many of today's IT pros might not realize it, but IT has had to deal with technological disruption in every generation. Today’s digital revolution, driven by mobile, social, and cloud computing, is no exception. It's just more pronounced and accelerated than anything that has come before.
IT pros who understand disruption can avoid being overwhelmed by it -– or worse, missing the boat, said Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who spoke on this topic at the BoxWorks conference in San Francisco this week.
Christensen ought to know: He literally wrote the book on technological disruption. He has even come up with a methodology to measure the disruption life cycle. During his presentation, Christensen displayed a slide to illustrate that in the beginning, only a few people in IT (or whatever the keepers of the computer equipment were called) could use a given machine. But over time, a larger and larger population had access -- and with each technological leap, IT had to adjust.
During his talk, Christensen walked us through the history of computing from the 1940s until today:
He made the point that in the beginning, there were mainframes in a market dominated by IBM. These systems were large, very expensive -- he threw out the figure $200 million -- and only a very small group of professionals was able to operate them
By the 1960s, companies like Digital Equipment Corp. came up with minicomputers, which, instead of taking up a whole room, were housed in a small cabinet. Their cost was around $200,000, and a much larger, although still exclusive, group of technology professionals could operate them
By the mid-1980s, we had desktop computers from firms like HP that cost around $2,000. They allowed even nontechnical people to operate a computer for a relatively modest price -- with the caveat that they were tied to a desk to have access. By the 1990s, lightweight, portable laptops allowed users to take that computing power with them when they left their desks
Today, we have mobile devices from the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Google that cost around $200 and fit in your pocket, providing access to information from just about anywhere.
From the 1940s to now, IT has had to evolve through each of these technological changes -- and it's worth noting that the companies that dominated each of these periods in terms of sales were disrupted themselves as each new cycle developed.
Today, we have several forces at play that are having a tremendous impact on IT pros. These are mobility, social networking, and cloud computing, and each of these trends is being driven by the evolution of the smartphone.
Because of the changes driven by smartphone evolution, we now have different requirements when it comes to the software we use to run our businesses. Where large, complex, monolithic software packages from companies like Oracle and EMC ruled the day when we were tethered to our desks, today we need things to be simple and flexible. We also require ubiquitous access to enterprise content across mobile devices -– which is where cloud services come in.
All of these changes have spawned further changes. Box CEO Aaron Levie pointed out in one of his talks at BoxWorks that the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement developed because of the swift mobile development cycle. There isn't time for IT pros to keep up with the speed with which these devices turn over and the next generation comes along. As IT pros are forced to rethink how they provision software to keep up with these rapid device development cycles, the cloud provides a way to update software on the backend automatically, easing the pressure.
The current transition in technology is happening much faster than any previous IT generation's transition, so it’s natural that the changes are startling and hard to grasp -- even more than the changes that came before. Forward-thinking IT pros must move their companies quickly to confront this new technological reality. Those that don’t will put the future of their companies at risk.
I understand the 1960 mainframe focused managers and programmers who entered the IT field expecting a steady non-disruptive career. I feel for them as their world changed more than expected.
However, anybody entering the technology space today, or even over the last 2 decades, has to expect disruption. Anybody who does not like change/disruption should run from a technology job. May sound harsh - but it's true. And, as this article noted, the rate of disruption is not slowing down!
This is a time when the Gartner Hype Cycle ends up being useful. Gartner puts out a few notes every year talking about where specific technologies are on the hype cycle.
And even then, It Depends. To bring up more Gartner terminology, it's a matter of whether they're a type A, type B, or type C company, with type A being early adopters and type C being late adopters. There's certainly plenty of cases where adopting new technology too soon can be a problem -- ask all the WiMax vendors out there.
You misudnerstand me. It's not the few who need to pay attention. It's the opposite. A few can ignore it, but most will be disrupted just as happened in every other stage of technological change. Most companies don't use mainframes anymore. Most don't use mini computers anymore. In a few years if this holds true, and there is little reason to believe it wont', then PCs will be used by fewer and fewer and workers and most work will be done on mobile devices.
Agreed to the core. Figuring out if you really need to dive into mobile technology is the important question. Sometimes, the clutter forces the business into decisions that are not that effective later. So, yes only a few companies will have to deal with what is being discussed here.
I'm coming to believe there is disruption at every stage including customers. If you make the wrong bet, you could be putting your business at peril. The trouble is figuring out what's hype and what's real. I think we can all agree, however, that mobile is having a huge impact on technology and it is putting pressure on organizations to accomodate the needs of mobile users.
As I said, that doesn't mean every company has to worry about this. I'm sure there are claims processors sitting at their PCs working on client-server software who will be just fine for a number of years, but for anyone who has a mobile workforce, client-server is no longer going to suffice.
Yes, it does seem like not many companies are actually jumping on the change wagon. Overall the adoption rate seems to be slow atleast for SME's. Probably it has to do with the financial crisis that firms are facing these days.
Still, I agree with you. If they do not adopt the change it will hurt them in the future.
As I said in an earlier comment there are still companies using the previous generation's hardware, but the overall trend is pretty clear and for most companies ignoring mobile and the cloud is going to hurt them in the long run (and with the speed of change today pehaps in the short run too).
It's worth noting that as big as these disruptions are, they don't eliminate what came before. There are still companies using mainframes, minis and PCs. They haven't gone away because there are still viable use cases.
It's just that with each change, there are going to be users within your organization who want to move to the next thing. It may driven by individuals, departments or IT itself, but just because not everybody goes along doesn't mean it's not happening or that it's not significant.
You don't mention what kind of business your client is in. Perhaps he can succeed in spite of his fear of being online, but overall speaking in general trends, his business can't last forever this way.
Disruption is tricky business, but eventually, it catches up and destroys the laggards.
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