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CIOs are facing a daunting task these days: they constantly have to keep up with the latest technology curve's edge which seems to be advancing faster and faster these days. It is like what the Red Queen describes in Alice in Wonderland, you have to run fast to be in the same place. Thus there is little opportunity for re-factoring or introspection into the current state of affairs. A latest study shows that technology innovations are ushered in once in 3 months now, it used to be 6 months two years ago, and a year about 5 years ago. Unless some variant of Moore's Law kicks into effect we will be in a Wonderland soon.
The problem is that at any given point in time, there are three segments to the technology landscape facing the CIO and allied CXO organizations: there is a known: this is what is visible and promoted by vendors and analysts primarily. This segment is becoming thinner with the passage of time because of the above mentioned accelaration in innovation. If you imagine this as a layered cake, right at the top is this thin "known" layer. It looks attractive, has a lot of icing and decoration and pulls you right in.
Right below the known layer and sharply defining it, is the unknown layer. These are the deeper truths about the innovation which can be known but is currently unknown because practice has just not caught up. For example the literature associated with EJB practice is a case in point. Today we know a lot more about how not to use EJBs and their true value in an enterprise architecture. A lot of this was unknown at the time of the first spec release.
For the unknown to become known, the pace of technology innovation has to slow down, or at least the pace of adoption has to slow down. If we are constantly looking for the next best thing, we will not have any time to put the existing technologies through thier paces in an enterprise. Since neither of these are likely, the known layer becomes thinner ( and more attractive over time ). But atleast serious minded folks will have an understanding that there is a vast unknown layer out there, waiting to be explored.
However the point that eludes most of us is that there is a third layer below this, which is the unknowable. That is right: you cannot know this. All you can say with certainty is that this layer exists somewhere out there for sure. And there could be valuable secrets in there which can transform the enterprise but which probably would never see the light of the day, unless it is reincarnated in some later innovation and surfaces as part of the known layer.
For example there is a recent study which states that nearly 70 - 75% of the processing power of desktop CPUs goes unutilized. But the kicker is this: this percentage is unrelated to the type of processor. What this means is that even if you had a bunch of 80x86 powered machines you would still be utilizing only 25 - 30% of their power which would remain constant if you upgraded to Itanium chips. The upgrade to later and more powerful chips is unavoidable in the present environment and it is not exactly guided by utilization and load.
Now it is possible to connect a group of 80x86 based machines in a grid and work on really complicated problems: but these possibilities are unknowable because no CIO in his or her right mind would replace their existing machines with older chips just to figure out the possibilities in the unknowable land.
So the game goes on: there are times when we should ask ourselves whether it is time to stop running so that we can reach our destination.
