The Personal Compute Part Of IT Modernization
by
Randy Mears
Modernization is all the rage in IT these days, and for a good reason. There was a time when anything that came out on a computer was, by definition, modern and ultimately better. That was the conventional wisdom, you computerized it and that somehow made it better. These days we see things a bit differently. Computers have been with us for decades and, while the technology has improved dramatically, the resulting solutions are still often firmly grounded in the ways of the past, still carrying much of the old baggage that we need to shed. We all understand that computerizing a solution does not necessarily make it better; this is particularly true from the user's viewpoint.
In this missive from Sun Microsystem's Greg Papadopoulous, we get a hint at a better way forward. A way where design is not just a slowly evolving set of improvements in the way we have done things in the past, but a new approach that is not based on taking an old concept and just replicating it while adding some digital enhancements. How about an approach that instead integrates with our lifestyles and challenges our technology developers? What if such solutions were the only ones we considered acceptable?
Since we're so intent on IT modernization these days, shouldn’t we want to do it right this time?
