InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology
e2 Conference & Expo - Boston 2013

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Given my current obsession with understanding everything I can about how cloud computing is beginning to look, feel and behave like a variety of other complex adaptive systems, I’ve started paying close attention to the widespread practice (outside of IT, it seems) of systems thinking.

Defined in Wikipedia as “the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole,” systems thinking represents a modeling,

Analyst firm IHS published an important study last week. It predicts that, for the first time ever, PC shipments would drop year-over-year; for 2012, total shipments will drop 1.2 percent. IDC and Gartner agree, noting that third quarter PC shipments fell 8 percent. It's the steepest drop since 2001.While it's clear that use of new form factors such as smartphones and tablets has been skyrocketing over the past few years, this study is the first that indicates that this growth, far from incremental, is taking share from the previously dominant form factor. Of course, some may not accept the study's findings, feeling that rumors of the death of

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about IT and its role in the era of cloud computing, API-driven development and increasing interconnectivity. As enterprise computing moves from a server-centric to an application-centric operations model, what happens to the role of IT in a corporation? What is IT to cloud, anyway?Nick Carr famously wrote about the lack of differentiation that IT brings to the business in his 2004 book Does IT Matter?. His argument was essentially that as computing is more and more expected in business, the things IT does for the business provide less and less differentiation. That means that each business owning its own information

For all the freedom promised by cloud computing, businesses may be really looking at less choice and more constraint than ever before. Whether that happens is the technology industry’s next great battleground.On one side are large incumbent tech providers like Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, who already have broad portfolios of technology and deep corporate relationships after years of selling products. On the other are younger companies, whose products and services were built for cloud computing and thus may offer more innovative approaches.At its recent annual customer showcase, Oracle’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, made much of his company’

The world of information technology is always changing. But over the last six years it has started to change more rapidly with the genesis of cloud providers, the growth in the number of giant webscale companies, and the widespread use of virtualization in enterprise environments. A new era is upon us.

In the next five years a new way of thinking about, constructing and operating IT will emerge. Data centers are no longer the size of mini-marts but instead are mega-marts like Rob Roy’s 2.2 million

Technologies around the Internet and the WAN have been around for some time. However, it wasn’t until very recently that a specific term began circulating which was supposed to emphasize the combination of these technologies. Cloud computing was born out of the idea of a distributed computing system where information was available from numerous different points. Although the idea has certainly caught on – there are still some misconceptions and confusions around the cloud.Many businesses have found great ways to utilize a cloud model. Now, they’re able to be more agile, grow faster and even add to their business resiliency. Still, there are those

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