InformationWeek

February 4, 1999

Keeping Up With The Pace Of Change: The Duh! Effect

By Lou Bertin

rossing my desk recently was this year's version of Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group's annual global survey of CIOs. It's always a thoroughgoing work, and my eye was irresistibly drawn to a single line in the cover letter that accompanied the report, which stated: "Technological innovations foster the need for additional technological innovations to support them."

My initial reaction was "Duh!" It was also about as far wrong as it could possibly be, and I'm one who has been known to jump to some truly awful conclusions.

With the benefit of a minute's thought, I came to realize that the single line that drew my eye crystallizes what so many InformationWeek readers have been saying is one of the true drivers of technology change within their companies. Though they may not have voiced their sentiments in so many words, InformationWeek readers -- no doubt some of whom were among the 1,500 CIOs Deloitte & Touche polled -- have made it plain that the dynamic that has brought the state of the art in enterprise computing to where it is today is a constantly self-renewing cycle of change wherein innovations really DO beget other innovations, either out of necessity or convenience.

In many ways, the cycles of technology change -- or at least of technology popularity -- represent a sort of parent-child relationship in which roles can be switched at will. If indeed it is true that children eventually assume a parenting role as their progenitors age, so it can be said that technologies have their days when they are nurtured and, in turn, nurture others.

As inexpensive data storage gave "birth" in a way to data warehousing, data warehousing helped beget data mining. Data mining, in turn, led to "customer-centric" marketing techniques that helped pave the way for the intimate online relationships that enterprises have fervently pursued with a couple -- or a couple million -- of their nearest and dearest customers. Those relationships, of course, generate terabytes of data and those terabytes bring us back to inexpensive data storage . . . and so on and so on.

Do specific technologies benefit and suffer through these self-perpetuating cycles? Yes, no, and maybe. I suppose a stake has been driven through the heart of punch cards, but just about everything else is in play. Consider that the Deloitte & Touche survey shows that ATM and LAN technologies -- two holdovers from the Pleistocene pre-Internet days -- are expected to grow by 14% over the next two years to achieve an 85% usage rate at respondents' sites. Heady stuff, that. Just think that relative whippersnapper technologies such as data warehousing, multimedia, and handheld computers will need to more than double their current growth rates -- as the Deloitte & Touche survey suggests they will -- to achieve usage rates of 80% among respondents.

Steve Mase, VP for information technology at Smith Barney, recently summed up the situation neatly, I think, before a group of InformationWeek readers when he said that dealing with change is responsible for so many IS executives having "bigger paychecks and bigger headaches" than ever. All the more headache-provoking is the fact that the technologies themselves are transmogrifying simultaneously with their use, reuse, and reinvention. Not too many years ago, did many among us think that client-server technology would ever disappear? Reappear? Make a triumphant comeback? It did, it has, and it will, just like the LAN . . . or the mainframe . . . or "entry-level" electronic data interchange. 5.25-inch floppies, anyone?

In the months ahead, there will be much more to come on the subject of change as InformationWeek releases the findings of this year's "Redefining IS" research, which was conducted among CIOs and senior-level IS and IT executives. That research is expected to show that this year -- as was the case last year and the year before and the year before -- the watchwords that are key to success aren't technologies, but how those technologies are applied. Your reaction to that pithy revelation might be a resounding "Duh!" just like the one offered by a temporarily misguided observer of this business. And look where that "Duh!" led us.

[For information about the Redefining IS Series and to find out how you can attend a roundtable at a city near you, visit our Redefining IS page].

Lou Bertin is managing editor of CMP Media's Business Forums Group and an industry consultant. He can be reached at BertinL@aol.com.

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