The Flip-side of Moore’s Law
If you’re noticing that your Enterprise System and Business Administration capabilities are literally dis-integrating [sic], there’s a reason for that. With every advance in computing power, greater sophistication and specialization is required to manage the inputs and outputs vis a vis the increases in processing capability. Networks, databases, storage systems, enterprise applications, etc. are becoming more locally sophisticated, and at the same time broadly dispersed. This is placing enormous pressures on IT and Systems Engineering support organizations to keep up. It’s like trying to balance your bank account while the number and diversity of your banks is doubling every year, but your money’s not. It’s the flip side of Moore’s Law (“The Law”) – the corollary of which is that computing power doubles every two years.
So, I did a bit of math.
According “The Law”, in 2017 we’ll enter “Period 14” of the law’s couplets. This means that computing power today is nearly 33.5 million timesgreater than it was in 1965. By 2021 (Period 15) computing power will have compounded by a factor of nearly 135 Million! The pace beyond that is mind-boggling, which begs the question, where is Newton in all of this? If Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”, then what is it, exactly, that is acting against Moore’s law, aside from human limitations?
I think that’s it.
Just this year Intel announced that they would be slowing production to find new materials capable of supporting the demands of Moore’s Law. So the force on the flip side of Moore’s Law – Newton’s Third – is System and Business administration. Put another way, it’s Service: Gordon Moore discovered “The Law”. Therefore, the only way to adjust the impact of the law is to manage service and support accordingly.
Moore’s law is focused on the development of a product – a “thing” – in this case the transistor.
We create systems to harness, extract, manage, and support the capabilities of these “things”. Several “Periods” into the era of Moore’s Law, the difficulties of delivering solid Enterprise Information System support are increasing at an alarming rate; driven by the product-centric advances in technology that are, in turn, driven by Moore’s Law. But at some point the opposite-reaction impact of Newton’s Third are going to kick in and change the mix on Moore’s momentum.
Products are great, but Service is King.
