And Not Or
by
Charlie Bess
I was in an exchange the other day with some folks talking about the increased importance of mobile computing. I couldn’t agree more, but my view may be a bit different. My perspective is that organizations will demand mobile and fixed applications. It’s not a choice between things, but an acceptance of things. The true adoption of mobile devices can have a game changing effect, but it is not about the devices but what we do with them and people want to do those things everywhere.
Microsoft is spending a ton of money on unified communications (the individual’s context) and at the same time focusing on business process, workflow and rules (the enterprise context). The intersection of these contextual perspectives is how we’ll overcome the information overload wave that’s headed our way (if it didn’t hit a long time ago).
I’ve not seen that same amount of interest and effort investment in this intersection from the open source side (but it may be too broad for the isolated pocket view that’s pervasive in the open source space or I could have just missed it). Even so, organizations will need to embrace open source as well as accept the best capabilities of the commercial software market. It is not a choice between those camps, instead it’s among them.
Similarly when looking at green IT, information technology should be about the value delivered and not just code and compute cycles or as one comment stated “humanitarian advantage”, those are a means to an end. We don’t have to choose between delivering value and being green -- when you go on a diet you don’t have to choose between “eating right” and losing weight. Being efficient is adding value, we need to do more of both.
Organizations that will compete effectively in the coming years are going to shift their thinking to “and” and not “or”.
