1. Look Around: The Idea Economy Is Here

By Rod Knowles

Several weeks ago, as I was engulfed in watching yet another exhausting and ludicrous presidential debate, I was wondering why I wasn’t watching re-runs of “Beverly Hills 90210.”

My kids, on the other hand, were clueless. They were involved in a lengthy, unfathomable and meaningless conversation. If you have kids, then you already know they weren’t actually talking to each other – they were communicating through their mobile devices. They successfully had a 90-minute conversation without any dialogue, whatsoever. The only people talking in the room were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which sounded to me more like Mrs. Donovan – Charlie Brown’s teacher.

It was then that it became apparent that my kids might never actually talk to each other, as long as brilliant minds continue creating mobile interaction applications. SnapChat, Twitter, TeleGram and Wickr are just a few that they use. My children relentlessly add and remove applications faster than anything I have ever witnessed. They also don’t seem to have any patience in dealing with applications that are slow, buggy and/or just don’t work. Whether it be their iPhones, tablets, laptops, whatever, it really doesn’t matter, they are consistently looking for the latest, cool app they can use and share with their circle of friends.

It’s here, the Idea Economy. 

Some experts would say that change is coming; I believe it’s already here. Businesses must evolve and adapt, or they will perish similar to 8-track tapes and the bubble gum that used to come in my Topps baseball card pack. 

Some businesses are already adapting. They have realized that its not enough to just take an idea and turn it into a product or service: They must be faster than their competition to be successful. 

Others still face development and IT operational challenges. The inability to develop, secure, deploy, monitor and maintain a quality application is becoming more difficult as consumers want things faster. Time is the biggest enemy companies face today. 

Moving faster and staying ahead of the competition necessitates several changes to traditional IT organizations:

• Instituting practices that emphasize collaboration and communication between developers and other IT professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes (DevOps).
•  Efficiently scaling and managing resources while ensuring industry-leading availability and redundancy through the use of server virtualization technology.
• Increasing the frequency of software releases through continuous integration and continuous deployment while reducing operational and capital expenditures by containerizing your applications.

Today, almost all businesses are software companies. Applications, including mobile, are becoming more critical for almost any business to succeed and stay ahead of its competitors. If your application fails, so does your business. 

But what does that mean in your day-to-day world? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog.

Rod Knowles is a solutions architect at Convergent Technologies Group.