IT must ease the processing pressure on the human brain

“Look at those cavemen go.” When Mr Bowie sang this, I’m not sure it was a positive comment, but I’m severely limited in my ability to undertake such literary criticism. I wrote my last essay when I was 16, in stark contrast to some of my university friends who could produce a convincing argument that a RAID array controller manual was a commentary on the struggles of the individual in modern society. Actually, when I hear about those cavemen, it strikes me that they were rather impressive.

So put aside your day-to-day concerns – that virtualisation project or new firewall can wait a few minutes. Step back and let’s consider those cavemen and their defining quality: their information. After all, information is the ‘I’ in ‘CIO’.

I live in a Suffolk village; nothing happened here for 1000 years or so before it all hotted up. The church tower was used to look out for Vikings – gatecrashers who would turn up, have a party, take the booze and leave with the cute women. Even this only happened once every 50 years or so, so information flow was very limited. OK, when the Vikings did arrive, it did require real-time data processing.

Not a lot changed for another 500 years before a major informational leap forward with newspapers, practical post and the railway, which meant that for the first time people moved more than 10 miles from their birthplace. Even in my mum’s 1940s rural Ireland, there were so few phones in the town that communications revolved around boys fetching the relevant person when a call came in.

By the 1960s, the local accountant got 10 letters a day and some phone calls. That same person will now get 200 emails, work with people all over the world and be on the phone anywhere and anytime.

If we plotted the amount of information being processed by our Suffolk dweller over history, it would look like the curve you get when you drop a match into a can of petrol – not much for a long time, then an explosion.

As the information flow or Input-Output (I/O) has grown in orders of magnitude, the ability of our brains to produce output has kept up. This tells us that the human being throughout history has been I/O-bound, not processor-bound.

As we fix this I/O blockage with the internet, videoconferencing, mobile communications and so on, the brain gets more and more done. In fact we can now network those brain processors into much more powerful, multiprocessor brain systems as modern collaboration systems allow distributed teams to act as one.

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