CTO Articles
Published in IT World
April 24, 2007
Going forward, going backward, changing
What is the nature of progress in IT? When we say that IT is progressing through all these endless revolutions and waves and eras and generations and 2.0's and 3.0's...what do we mean?
Let us draw a simple mental picture. Let us assume that 'progress' - whatever it is - can be plotted as a point wandering around two dimensional space. Let us put time on the X axis and the quantity of this thing we call 'progress' on the Y axis. Now our little toy progress metric can do three things as time marches inexorably from left to right. It can go up, it can go down or it can stay at the same level...
Why am I laboring this simple point? Because the only thing that the universe we live in guarantees is that time will move inexorably forward. The X value of this thing called progress will always be greater tomorrow than it is today. That is the nature of time. However, there is no universal law that ensures that the inevitable progress of time on the X axis is correlated with the progress of 'progress' on the Y axis.
The word "progress" has such positive connotations doesn't it? Language can be such a tricky thing. Time progresses forward but there is no real sense (that I can think of) in which this current moment is better than any previous one. Time has moved on. It is not necessarily better for it.
We have a habit of strapping things to the back of the always-progressing time vector in the hope that some of the guaranteed forward movement will rub off on other things.
Information Technology for example. Does technology progress from year to year? Is this year's crop of new stuff in some way guaranteed to be better than last year's crop? Back to the simple graph for a moment: are we moving upwards inexorably? Perhaps we go upwards but stop at plateau from time-to-time? Perhaps the progress meter for Information Technology oscillate up and down like interest rates or pork belly prices?
It is, in my opinion, harder today to create a simple database-oriented application than it was when Ashton Tate's DBase[1] was all the rage. It is, in my opinion, harder today to create a simple groupware application than it was when Lotus Notes was all the rage[2]. That said, we can do things today - especially in a Web context - that would be impossible with either of those.
I guess what I'm saying is this. The stuff we have today is undeniably better than the stuff we had in yesteryear in a whole bunch of dimensions. However, it is also worse than what we had in yesteryear in some ways. I'm okay with this because I have learned not to always correlate forward movement of time with forward movement of... progress.
Some things get better, somethings get worse. Are we making progress overall? Is it a bit like the pork belly price graph. If you step back far enough do the local peaks and troughs reveal a clearer upwards or downwards direction? I don't know. Are we perhaps oscillating in such a way that IT is not getting better so much as just continually becoming different? I don't know.
I think we are making progress overall, with local blips where things get worse in certain areas.
The only thing that always, always progresses is time. Nothing else is guaranteed to progress with it.
Recognizing and accepting that fact has helped me stay (somewhat) sane over the years. I recommend it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton-Tate
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Notes