{"id":1549,"date":"2008-09-19T03:44:12","date_gmt":"2008-09-19T10:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/?p=1549"},"modified":"2009-09-23T07:12:01","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T14:12:01","slug":"the-coming-utility-computing-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/the-coming-utility-computing-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Utility Computing Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nicholas Carr is at it again, questioning the strategic value of IT.\u00a0 Only this time I find myself in nearly total agreement with him.<\/p>\n

Carr became famous, or infamous, for his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter,\u201d in which he argued that IT is an undifferentiated resource that has little strategic business value.\u00a0 His thinking has evolved since then, and in his new book, The Big Switch<\/a>,<\/em> he proposes that utility computing will increasingly become the corporate information infrastructure of the future.<\/p>\n

Utility computing means different things to different people.\u00a0 Some people draw an analogy to the electrical grid, but Carr argues that the information utility is far richer and more strategic.\u00a0 He outlined some of his perspective in this Q&A interview in CIO Insight magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Nicholas

Nicholas Carr<\/p><\/div>\n

The utility computing model that Carr foresees encapsulates many of the hottest concepts in IT today: virtualization, modular computing, software as a service, Web 2.0 and service-oriented architecture.\u00a0 Computing utilities of the future will be anchored in enormous data centers that deliver vast menus of applications and software components over the Internet. Those programs will be combined and tailored to suit the individual needs of business subscribers.<\/p>\n

Management of the computing resource, which for many years has been distributed to individual organizations, will be centralized in a small number of entities that specialize in that discipline.\u00a0 Users will increasingly take care of their own application development needs and will share their best practices through a rich set of social media tools.<\/p>\n

In this scenario, the IT department is transformed and marginalized.\u00a0 Businesses will no longer need armies of computing specialists because the IT asset will be outsouced. Even software development will migrate to business units as the tools become easier to use.<\/p>\n

This perspective is in tune with many of the trends that are emerging today.\u00a0 Software is a service is the fastest growing segment of the software market and is rapidly moving out of its roots in small and medium businesses to become an accepted framework for corporate applications.\u00a0 Data centers are becoming virtualized and commoditized. Applications are being segmented into components defined as individual services, which can be combined flexibly at runtime.<\/p>\n

There are sound economic justifications for all of these trends, and there’s no reason to believe they won\u2019t continue.\u00a0 So what does this mean for IT organizations and the people who work in them?<\/p>\n

Carr sums up his opinion at the end of the CIO Insight<\/em> interview: \u201c[I]nformation has always been a critical strategic element of business and probably will be even more so tomorrow. It’s important to underline that the ability to think strategically\u2026will be critically important to companies, probably increasingly important, in the years ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking this idea one step further, you can envision a future in which a pure IT discipline will become unnecessary outside of the small number of vendors that operate computer utilities.\u00a0 University computer science programs, which have long specialized in teaching purely technical skills, will see those specialties merged into other programs.\u00a0 Teenagers entering higher education today are already skill at building personal application spaces on Facebook using software modules.\u00a0 It’s a small step to apply those principles to business applications.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the past is a good predictor of the future. In my next entry, I\u2019ll give an example of how technology change revolutionized the world a century ago and draw some analogies to the coming model of utility computing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission. Nicholas Carr is at it again, questioning the strategic value of IT.\u00a0 Only this time I find myself in nearly total agreement with him. Carr … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[171,170],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-oZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1632,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}