The real consequence of Moore’s Law is that determined, creative people are enabled to endlessly redraw the technical world and others, consequently, the business world. There can be no stability yet people find it hard to endlessly re-calibrate their priorities to timescales determined by the near exponential tick-tock of Intel co-founder Moore’s clock.
I did not realise that when I was parachuted into the IT world in 1993 as Group VP IT for ICI. Taking a business-minded view of my inheritance, I was dismissive of much of what I saw. Fifteen years on, I am in the mood to pay a positive tribute to three change makers who opened my eyes to a key reality.
The computing revolution came to ICI by business-driven stealth through the 1960s and 1970s. Developing sets of technical tools were taken up and exploited in-house. Early supplier relationships developed between the commercial and accounting fraternity and IBM, and between the production and technical divisions and Digital.
My first change maker was ICI’s initial Group VP IT, appointed in 1983 with the remit to bring coherence to the mishmash of computing facilities and data networks. To deliver this objective he was given monopoly powers as the sole internal supplier of these infrastructural services.
He delivered coherence well within the decade, with major cost benefits to the business divisions and to ICI’s bottom line. In a Europe of national telecoms monopolies, he negotiated bandwidth deals with which he built ICI’s own high-productivity data networks and, setting data processing prices ‘location-independent’, he consolidated the myriad divisional processing centres into fewer world-class facilities. The divisions kept their freedom to create apps relevant to their particular businesses, but the processing/network infrastructural capabilities that supported them were company-wide. An early corporate version of the cloud, if you like.
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