Adamalthus

Amazon’s AWS re:Invent 2017 Marks the Beginning of a New Era in IT

tl;dr Amazon’s announcements at it’s 2017 developer conference define the beginning of new era in IT. The company announced a raft of new managed services that enable customers to focus on extracting business value from their application investments without the demands and costs of designing, building and operating complex infrastructures. Central to this third wave of cloud computing are new managed services for serverless-computing,_machine learning, data analytics, and the Internet-of-things_.

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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve presented a more forward looking view of what lies beyond our current conception of cloud computing at CloudConnect in Las Vegas, a research symposium at UC Berkeley and to the Northern California chapter of the Young Presidents Organization. I’ve used these presentations to outline an evolving set of ideas anchored around the idea that we’re in the middle of the 2nd Era of Computing rapidly evolving towards the 3rd Era. The organizing principle behind the ‘Era’ concept is the degree of coupling in and between application code and the underlying infrastructure. Continue reading →

Peter Temes – Founder and President of the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations (ILO) – was kind enough to invite me to speak on enabling the ‘Composable Enterprise‘™ at a recent meeting of the institute’s members in New York. Continue reading →

Sharing in the success of the digital economy

“The digitally enabled economy is unleashing a new wave of change, something we are only just beginning to feel and understand. The economic evidence shows that this innovation –the development and adoption of new products, services, processes and business models – is vital to support rising living standards. But making the political case for the progressive power of innovation, and the digital economy, can be more challenging. The forces of ‘creative destruction’ threaten incumbent firms, jobs, and the way people work and live, creating strong incentives to oppose change. Confronting these hard realities is one of the defining challenges for progressive politics in the 21^st century.”

Includes a chapter by Desiree van Welsum and me.

Anyone who has spent any time discussing cloud with me, or seen me present on cloud issues will no doubt quickly learn how fond I am of analogizing this technology domain with the automotive industry.

Our drive to solve the Time-to-Value problem and to implement continuous value delivery have deep rooted connections to the mass production innovations of Ford, the scientific management disciplines of Taylor and the far reaching Lean Production System invented by Toyota. As IT professionals we have – in my view – much to learn from the rich industrial heritage of high volume manufacturing processes.

I recently had the opportunity to share my views on cloud computing and it’s implications for developing economies at the World Bank in DC. Preparing for this talk gave me the opportunity to crystalize my thinking on the Cloud-Manufacturing analogy and are synthesized in the slides I presented which can be downloaded here.

Our latest paper on cloud computing and associated economic and policy implications was just published in the Journal of Industry, Trade and Competitiveness. Many thanks to my co-authors, Kenji Kushida and John Zysman.

Cross-posted from the Innovia Strategies Blog by Jonathan Murray & Desiree van Welsum

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence our servant may prove to be our executioner – Omar N. Bradley

What impact will the increasingly widespread use of digital tools and information have on our society and economy and how will we deal with the disruptive forces brought to life and amplified by these technologies?

Understanding the nature of this emerging transformation and identifying appropriate responses to ensure we successfully navigate the challenges is critical. Without this we risk a level of social and economic dislocation unseen since our transition to an industrial economy in the 17th and 18th centuries. But whereas the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy took over one hundred years, the transition from industrial to a cyber-economy will likely take a few decades at most – a rate of change our political and social systems are ill-prepared to deal with.

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