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EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Read and respond to what the EDS Fellows have to say about the future of technology on EDS' Next Big Thing Blog on eds.com.

Is Better, Faster & Cheaper a Driver or a Problem?

by Charlie Bess

I was talking with one of the other EDS fellows about the future of technology and what is a foundation for thinking about it. One of the things we discussed was exponential change. There is the exponential change of technology capability (e.g., Moore’s Law), there is the data explosion enabled by more capability at a lower cost enabling technology to permeate the entire environment. There is also the exponential growth of change itself, essentially changing faster than any one individual can comprehend.

I pushed back a bit in our conversation saying “When is good enough, enough?” Will there be a point where it costs more to add the new capability than it could possibly be worth? When is more data is too much data? When there are no mechanisms to simplify the change to the point, where we can use it?

Or does that just drive us to automate more… essentially a positive feedback loop.

Since I am more of a early adopter and willing to put up with quite a bit of technology turmoil (e.g. , MS Server 2008, Sun SPOTS), I started slugging down the slope of defending technology, until I caught myself.

How much of the market is an early adopter? Not that much. What value is there to stability? Actually, quite a bit. Most organizations want a solid foundation that can be counted on in their systems. Running the latest technology is important for some, but we can’t confuse that with important for all. Everyone wants to have better, faster, cheaper but in reality 2 out of 3 is the most we can hope for.

Published Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:16 PM

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Comments

Posted by Jeremy Huppatz Thursday, July 12, 2007 3:23 AM

Charlie,

Is it perhaps possible that better/faster/cheaper are all to some degree spurious measures when taken in isolation? Shouldn't the conversation be talking about the mapping of client value achieved against time (faster), quality (better) and cost (cheaper) measures to see what the optimal value is? There'd be an interesting topological analysis in actually crunching the numbers to look at the optimal points.

Also... are there other dimensions to "better" (i.e. high value to the client) that need to be considered? Such as:

* How ethical is the solution?

* What is the solution's ecological impact?

* What is the level of repeatability/reusability of the solution?

* What level of resilience to the next major entelich leap in technology will the solution have?

* How soon will the components of the solution need to be replaced or upgraded?

* What level of additional revenue does the solution offer?

* What is the risk of obsoletion or maintenance cost spikes due to changing business conditions (legislative/political/management personalities)?

Can these dimensions be given a numeric score that can be used for decision making? Are there any constraints (e.g. minimum values) on those sorts of scores that would also be valid inputs into the optimization strategy? Would it be valid to assume that those scores be additive to provide an overall "Value" metric that an optimization could be performed against?

This could potentially be a critical solution validation step for new projects and an important pre-sales optimization step.

I could probably think of some other value measurement systems that you might want to look at optimizing against cost/time measures. I think the companies that provide solutions that define solutions that optimize ALL of those measures will be the ones that take home the lion's share at the end of the day.

Your thoughts?

Jeremy Huppatz

Australia ADU - Data Engineering

Posted by Charlie Bess Thursday, July 12, 2007 2:28 PM

When i was reading through your note it reminded me about the project related work. There are three dimensions: resource, speed, scope. The person who wants the project can control 2 of the three to reach an acceptable level of quality. They can't control all three.

Those who can do this kind of balancing and negotiation will be significantly more effective than those who can not. People have known this for many years and yet the industry still has difficulties with getting projects done on time and within budget.