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All hail the transistor, 60 years on

Beverley Head, Information Age

12/05/2007 14:03:00

By 2005 sales of transistors rose to 1 billion transistors per person.

The transistor turns 60 this year and in the years since its invention, it has led to a complete overhaul of every industry: farmers use RFID chips to track cows and Australia boasts unmanned wharves controlled by remote stevedoring systems.

Cameras are now computers with just the lens recalling a mechanical heritage, and Airbus's new A380 super plane boasts more than 1 billion lines of code (25 million times as much as Microsoft Windows).

On a recent visit to Australia, Naoyuki Akikusa, the chairman of Fujitsu, said the transistor and embedded systems had transformed every industry. Information technology, he maintained, was the major enabler of innovation in every business sector and would continue to play a leading role as governments and corporations sought sustainability and solutions to climate change problems.

But still further changes loom.

"We are at a turning point where the Net world is mapping the real world and the real world is mapping the Net world," said Akikusa. Put simply, technology and the internet are changing the fundamental nature of business as corporations engage online with their suppliers and customers in what is more of a complex supply web than a simple supply chain.

With more than 80 million Web sites, and a billion people online, it's not surprising that the role of IT employees who have to deliver the systems that support these new structures is going through a tectonic shift.

Problem solving has traditionally been the cornerstone of information technology: the business has a process they need to automate or a product they want to create, it calls in IT to create a solution; a system needs to be updated to meet new legislative requirements, wheel in the IT team; profit's too low - develop an IT system to automate the process and lift productivity.

This artisan approach, however, is reaching its limits according to some analysts.

Smart enterprises have always viewed the IT group as more than just troubleshooters for business problems - these companies have benefited from using information systems to help craft business strategy rather than just fix a tactical problem. It's an approach that continues to percolate through the corporate world.

The 2007 CIO Agenda Survey released by Gartner in February made clear that this is a long-term shift and that in the future "CIOs will need to replace 'do more with less' with 'make a difference with what they have'."

According to Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner executive programs; "CIOs cannot rely on traditional actions such as improving operational efficiency, reducing IT costs and automation that lead to commoditisation to meet executive expectations. Success in 2007 requires making the enterprise different to attract and retain customers.

"CIOs will need to concentrate on information as a leverage point to enhance efficiency, increase effectiveness and support competitiveness," he added. While CIOs would still be responsible for IT - the mechanism - "they can play a greater role in leveraging information - the understanding that drives performance and innovation".

This will demand a clear understanding of what author and futurist Dr Richard Hames describes as the third wave of globalisation and its impact on business. Speaking at a Fujitsu-sponsored conference on Innovation and Sustainability Hames explained that the third wave of globalisation had arrived because technology was allowing "the individual to operate in zero geography", where the boundaries between corporations and their customers were blurring.

Simultaneously the "compete or die" mentality of corporations would change: "The concepts business used for the last 100 years are in doubt," said Hames.

Traditional value chains which squeeze out less competitive rivals would be replaced by more complex global business ecosystems which exist as a balance between corporate competition and collaboration in order to satisfy customers' increasingly complex requirements.

"The challenge is not to create a culture of innovation - although that is difficult enough," said Hames, "but to move from a problem-solving mind-set which is analytical to a higher level of consciousness about what is possible and sustainable.

"Today you see it very rarely and never in government - that is why so many are becoming irrelevant. A lot of corporations don't get it - and they will go bankrupt.

"The changes demand that we focus on innovation and innovation for sustainability."

According to Gartner analyst Craig Baty this need for a greater focus on sustainable corporate innovation will force a change in internal IT departments so they "move away from the cottage industry DIY toward the industrialisation of IT".

Corporate information technology solutions would increasingly be built on utilitarian IT products and solutions, tweaked to fit. While these may be partly customised - they won't be built from scratch, and may not even be provided internally but globally sourced.

That would free up the IT department to focus on how technology is applied, rather than building the technology itself.

"The traditional IT approach has been the artisan approach where everything is a project, built on the customer's time, on the customer's site and with the customer's money so the level of risk is quite high," he said.

Baty argued that the use of a more industrialised IT model meant that risk and cost could be reduced while innovation flourished. "Innovation and creation does not come from the assembly of the technology ... it comes from the use of technology," he said.

As information technology professionals know all too well, change begets more change, so it should come as no surprise that just around the corner is a new generation of technologies which promise change on a scale at least as great as that prompted by the invention of the transistor 60 years ago. A billion transistors per person per year may one day seem like chicken feed.

Bill Miller, the Herbert Hoover Processor of Public and Private Management at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and an Emeritus Professor of Computing at Stanford, believes nanotechnology will be an agent of change as great as the transistor which delivered the modern IT era.

A recent visitor to Australia, Miller said that nanotechnology "is an enabling technology in the same way that transistors were. Transistors allowed information technology to bloom. Nanotech will do the same and allow developments in medical science and clean energy," said Miller.

After 15-20 years in laboratories, he believes nanotech-based devices will now emerge as mainstream products within the decade.

And then things get really interesting.