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Martin Curley
Technology and the Impact on Business
Moore’s law, which is probably a nice synthesis of what’s happening in technology, basically that processing part will double every 18 months and that’s being delivered at less or equal cost. Well, Moore’s law is colliding with virtually every domain—every business domain, every social domain. It’s changing the way people interact around the globe. The internet has evolved from something that allowed different research labs shared data, now it’s become the foundation of actually global business, and perhaps even more importantly, this emerging global culture. So I think every domain will be fundamentally transformed by Moore’s law, by information technology. We’ll see information intensity of products go up.
We have a looming crisis around sustainability; the path that the world is on currently is unsustainable. Since sometime in 2009, we’re consuming more than one Earth’s worth of resources. And if we continue on this path, we’re going to face catastrophe. The big opportunity is to use information technology as a resource that can fuel this shift to a more sustainable world. More and more we see examples of where IT can be substituted for another resource, can automate a process and do it a lot more efficiently.
If we look at the energy efficiency of different industries—so, for example, automotive or the airline industry—there have been energy efficiency improvements over the last 20 or 30 years, on the order of 60%, 80%, maybe 120%. But information technology, the energy efficiency has improved by more than a million percent, over those 30 years. So what I think we need to do to get down to a much more sustainable path is to look for opportunities where we can dematerialize supply chains, using information technology. We can take activities that are very energy heavy and make them a lot more efficient through the use of information technology.
Technology and the Impact on Business
Moore’s law, which is probably a nice synthesis of what’s happening in technology, basically that processing part will double every 18 months and that’s being delivered at less or equal cost. Well, Moore’s law is colliding with virtually every domain—every business domain, every social domain. It’s changing the way people interact around the globe. The internet has evolved from something that allowed different research labs shared data, now it’s become the foundation of actually global business, and perhaps even more importantly, this emerging global culture. So I think every domain will be fundamentally transformed by Moore’s law, by information technology. We’ll see information intensity of products go up.
We have a looming crisis around sustainability; the path that the world is on currently is unsustainable. Since sometime in 2009, we’re consuming more than one Earth’s worth of resources. And if we continue on this path, we’re going to face catastrophe. The big opportunity is to use information technology as a resource that can fuel this shift to a more sustainable world. More and more we see examples of where IT can be substituted for another resource, can automate a process and do it a lot more efficiently.
If we look at the energy efficiency of different industries—so, for example, automotive or the airline industry—there have been energy efficiency improvements over the last 20 or 30 years, on the order of 60%, 80%, maybe 120%. But information technology, the energy efficiency has improved by more than a million percent, over those 30 years. So what I think we need to do to get down to a much more sustainable path is to look for opportunities where we can dematerialize supply chains, using information technology. We can take activities that are very energy heavy and make them a lot more efficient through the use of information technology.