IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

1.1. The more things change, the more they stay the same

Technological change is usually associated with progress. Airbags, electronics and fuelefficient engines have made cars safer, more comfortable and more reliable. Jetliners with the latest in engine technology, materials and avionics have made flying safer, cheaper and quieter. The modern world abounds with similar examples, from consumer electronics to mobile telephones.

There is one sector in which the rate of technological change has easily surpassed the above examples by orders of magnitude, and that of course is the computer industry. It has gone from mainframe to minicomputer (remember those?) to PCs, and now to the Internet. In the enterprise, commercial computing moved from the glass house to the desktop, dropping its price-tag a hundred million-fold in the process. And all of this was achieved within the short space of 25 years, as opposed to over 100 years for cars and planes. We've probably all heard about the comparison about a Rolls-Royce costing a few dollars and getting a million miles to the gallon if it had followed the same rate of progress as computers.

So what has this new generation of faster, better and cheaper computers actually brought in terms of progress (in the workplace – this book is not about computers in the home)? Well, to start with, around 80% of employees in the average company in the developed world have a computer on their desks today, as opposed to less than 10% in the early 80s. They ...