Can IT become the "Nervous System" of Business? First we must make mass distributed data processing a practical reality on the Internet data web. This requires overcoming the related problems of recurrent information model reengineering and reinvention. If the institutional IT managers of the world could choose the two toughest problems they face it would be these two. Web 2.0 is mostly going to be nothing more that cool demos until we tackle and tame these two classic strategic challenge problems.
Moreover, Web 2.0 requires far higher information quality and safety than we can generally muster today. This is the key strategic technology problem in perfecting Internet data web distributed business intelligence.
Unfortunately strategic technology challenge problems of this sort have largely been abandoned by the IT RD&E world today. In fact serious strategic IT RD&E has mostly disappeared. It's all science fiction speculative research now. It's about super-scientific information modeling and super-intelligent software. Thus the extreme emphasis of computational complexity theory and cogitative science.

George

Great thoughts... in terms of serious R&D outside of Wall Street you are probably correct. I would pose to you that massive distributed processing capabilities (middleware, distributed caching, data federation, virtual processing, compute, storage, acceleration/edge networking techniques, bandwidth) if implemented in a sound architectural approach is very doable today - peers on Wall Street and along with our own efforts were accomplishing this. Perhaps lessons from Wall Street need to be translated to the general market?!

Thanks for the thoughts.

I fully beleive that IT will become the nervous system of businesses in the future. However the value of some of the technologies mentioned needs to be better quantified and articulated to business leaders to change the perception of "Businesses being nervous of IT systems" to "IT being the the nervous system of businesses". For example, the lesser know benefits of grid computing like the option for rapid scalability, extensibility (in terms of features and functionality) and higher resiliency are seldom fully understood and quatified by IT leaders let alone business leaders. I think it is important for institutional IT managers to accept that at least some of the core technologies have arrived and start more rigorously quantifying and communicating the value of such technologies to their business partners.