Inverting Moore's Law, and Stimulating Demand
Companies are looking to take the benefits of Moore's Law in cash rather than computing, while they search for ways to re-stimulate demand for their products and services.
In this week's Economist (January 17th, 2009), there are two unrelated leading articles, almost side-by-side, which together reinforce the contribution that CIOs and their teams are now required to make to their organization's corporate and business strategies.
The first article "Accelerating Downhill" is about how the world's economies are suffering from a slumping demand for companies' products and services. The second, "Less is Moore", explains that people are now looking for the dividend of Moore's Law in cash, rather than in more powerful technologies.
Take these two articles together and you have three-pronged summary of the value that CIOs' strategies must now achieve:
- Provide corporate-wide leadership in exploiting information and technology to grow demand for the company's products and services.
- Robustly challenge the need for spending cash on new and replacement systems. Why can't we do more with the existing ones?
- Demand that the suppliers of IT focus on making their products and services increasingly efficient, achieving the same levels of capability, quality and performance for less cost.
As my earlier blog "2009 CIO Strategy: Business Productivity will Trump IT Efficiency" noted, CIO's must avoid the trap of concentrating their strategies on only the third of these. In a market suffering from a slump in demand, we can expect the companies that successfully boosts sales while becoming more efficient to triumph over those that simply reduce costs.
The Economist observes in its "Moore for Less" article that ‘there is strong demand for technologies that do the same for less money, rather than more for the same price'. Moore's Law, being about transistors on a chip, will not to be matched by IT as a whole: the costs of the same IT services will not halve every eighteen months or two years! But the effective inversion of Moore's Law is now in principle what is being demanded of IT suppliers.
Gartner envisage that IT investments will pick up quickly when the economy recovers. Until then, however, companies are bound to look at producing more value from the same IT capabilities - especially in the form of growing demand for their products and services - and want those capabilities to cost progressively less.
A refinement to the old 'more for less' maxim:
"More from the same, and the same for less".
P.S. Just after posting, this appeared: "Intel slashes processor prices" http://tinyurl.com/76d9pc
Previous Post: Enterprise Architecture: What Do You Think It Is?Next Post: Do Boards Think a CIO's Aim is to Influence Spending?
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
