“Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” Those are the questions that Gauguin asks in his hypnotic masterpiece illustrated above. The tropical paradise of Tahiti, in all its splendor, couldn’t distract him from this existential triad.

So what has that to do with IT?

Things Aint What They Used To Be

“Computer systems are not what they used to be.”  Anyone who’s been working in the computer industry for a decade or so can say that with confidence, because every decade or so the nature of computer systems changes either significantly, or dramatically – and usually dramatically. So we moved from mainframe systems to distributed systems to client server to the Internet and now we’re heading off into the cloud.

And as we have moved along this uncertain path, there has been a gradual separation of operational IT from business applications. Now, it isn’t that these two branches of IT weren’t somewhat separated at birth – they were always distinctly different disciplines. But it wasn’t unusual to find these two lines of IT locked in a guilty embrace, simply because it was easier to build, implement and run systems by mixing things up a little. Nevertheless it is beginning to look like those days are gone forever.

The prime cause of this is that software development has gradually unhooked itself from the underlying infrastructure. In the days of assembler, the developer was actually locked in at the machine code level. In the 3GL era the compiler tied you to an implementation environment. But all that interdependence was weakened with the advent of C and then along came Java and smashed it into little pieces. Since then we’ve entered a world of scripting languages and OO languages that run anywhere.

We are not pinned to specific computing environments by development languages and neither are we imprisoned by file systems any more. Indeed there has been a reversal of a remarkable kind with the advent of hypervisors. Now whole operating systems can be instantiated anywhere. The once mighty Windows has turned into a portable application execution environment with little to distinguish it from Linux, other than price.

And in the midst of all this, we are dashing off into the cloud.

Service Management

The advent of the cloud is what has finally severed business applications from operational IT. In my time I’ve been a software engineer and architect, who was always keenly aware of the performance limits of the environment for which I was building systems. I didn’t develop applications, I built systems. Those were distinctly different activities. Now I’d be hard put to find a job anywhere that involved actually defining an architecture, from the iron to the business applications. Such jobs exist in very large organizations and in brave new companies like Google and Amazon, but they are not so common.