Outside Innovation

Recurring Patterns from Patty's Pioneers

At the end of October, a few of our stalwart band (going strong since 1989) of Patty’s Pioneers met face-to-face to compare notes on where technology is going and what challenges they’re confronting and overcoming in their varied businesses. As usual, the conversations were rich and deep and built upon the foundation we’ve established over the years. We delight in seeing the recurring patterns in how we think about applying IT, how we view the world, and how we address organizational issues.

We are all tickled by the fact that today’s technologies lend themselves really well to the kinds of system designs the pioneers are really good at. The systems and software these leading-edge architects design have lots in common:

• They keep a lot of data in memory/cache and deliver rich, but simple user experiences.
• They don’t assume an always up/high bandwidth connection, so they are parsimonious when it comes to transmitting data.
• They use consumer technology platforms as much as possible.
• They design elegant and simple APIs.
• They use services/distributed objects that request information and deliver information.
• They don’t care where in the world those services reside (in the cloud somewhere is generally fine).
• They assume that everything is loosely coupled (e.g., not always connected, but able to quickly find, connect and disconnect).
• They view the world as being made up of events that trigger actions based on business rules.

Expect a Sea Change in Application and Information Architectures

Intersecting waves of technology are converging: Cloud computing, massive parallel processing, distributed file systems like Hadoop, dynamic provisioning to the cloud, embedded computing, open mobile platforms and APIs, and semantic publishing, to cite just a few. Patty’s Pioneers (technology architects) have been talking recently about how these phenomena will profoundly change the way we do business, use computers and address problems. We already have the ability to send huge volumes of information to the compute cloud to perform long-running, compute-intensive pattern detection. Google works that way. The genome project and many other scientific endeavors are enabled by this capability. You can solve BIG problems. You can offload bursty, compute-intensive applications. You can enable new capabilities like high-frequency trading.

Information, data types, and file formats are changing too. Scientific and technical data isn’t always organized in relational databases or spreadsheets. There are huge flat files, analog files, arrays, sequences, 3D models, and a myriad of data types and patterns that most business IT was never designed to address. We are sensing and detecting real-time changes in everything from weather to ocean pH. We perform chemical analyses, create molecular models, and find interrelationships among everything. We have massive amounts of genetic sequence data, with genome browsers, model organism databases, molecule- or process-specific databases.

Information that we want to share and have customers find and use is increasingly being tagged to accelerate semantic processing. Many of Patty’s Visionaries (customer-centric e-business leaders) have already embarked on large semantic tagging projects. They are convinced that, in their fields of endeavor, important concepts need to pop out of the sea of words and data so that these concepts can be linked to the appropriate behaviors and services. A company name came be linked to news, financial data, personnel information, products, patents, geography, partners, and customers. A chemical formula or a gene sequence can be linked, viewed, and acted upon with a staggering array of tools.

This next generation of distributed computing and pattern matching will unleash a new economy – with new opportunities for value creation.

As I contemplate the tremendous and revolutionary changes that will hit all of our businesses as a result of the new ways in which we can now detect patterns and process information, I am grateful for the magic of the human brain. Our intuition and emotions combine with our sense-making and pattern matching to make magical leaps across disciplines.

This next generation of computing architectures is upon us. It’s time to take the plunge. Say goodbye to Microsoft Word, say hello to N-dimensional arrays and patterns. Say goodbye to PDAs and laptops. Say hello to holograms you can gesture through.

Are We Entering a Golden Age of IT?

How Pioneering Technology Architects View the Current Business Challenges and IT Opportunities

For over 10 years, our small band of technology architects (many of whom have now turned into business strategists) has been meeting twice a year. This is my “by invitation only” group known as Patty’s Pioneers. Each year, I learn an incredible amount from the rich sharing of problems and approaches these guys and gals are using to design and evolve their businesses’ technology architectures. The same patterns re-emerge over and over again, across industries as diverse as financial services, ocean shipping, energy management, retail, information services, manufacturing, supply chain logistics, and solving the world’s largest problems.

Each year, the patterns of our conversations form a semi-coherent picture in my head. I thought you might be interested in my non-Geek’s view of the way I see that these brilliant and persistent “big thinkers” think about the things they work on. (Pioneers: I have kept the quotes anonymous, but I am happy to attribute them! My apologies to any of you who may feel I’ve missed the point or over-simplified! Please chime in!)