IT and the 1970's car

It's not everyday you find yourself on the front page of a magazine so I may as well make the most of it. That's me on the front cover of Reach magazine discussing GJ's experience with Neverfail.

Looking back I can see how much technology has changed my industry sector.  I qualified as a Chartered Accountant well over a decade ago.  In those days we were all using pencils and paper.  There was one computer and that was seen as an extravagance.  We now collaborate internally and externally online, in real time, sharing the same business systems and using online meetings.  Our business processes are now welded together with IT which means we have to ensure the IT infrastructure can deliver business continuity and high availability. 

I tend to view current IT like a car in the 1970's.  Most of the time it worked, but some days it just had problems and was difficult to get started (especially in the Winter).  Looking back it is clear that the 1970's car just wasn't reliable or resilient as the cars we are now using in the 21st century. On top of that in the 1970's there was a big culture of not wearing seat-belts (compulsory wearing of font seat-belts only became UK law in 1983) something that is not unlike current SME IT disaster planning.

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Philip Woodgate

Comments

[Dennis H]

Blimey Philip - where did you train? 18 years ago I was building networks running Novell - literally cabling the office one Saturday and learning to be a Novell engineer in a matter of days. That was when you wrote to the command line in order to fire up the network. Ours was a monster - 10 stations!

[Philip Woodgate]

You're kidding, where were you when we needed you? Around the same time I was at a typical SME firm of accountants based on Baker Street. There was only the one machine with shared access. The daft thing was my computer at home was more powerful than the one at work. It even had Supercalc!