A brief history of disruption: Technologies that upended enterprise IT
“Smaller but cleaner.” That’s one of the predictions voiced in I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, the 1971 album by comedic legends the Firesign Theatre. “Bozos” describes a dystopian future in which the president of the United States is powered by a mainframe successfully hacked by the hero—cutting-edge technology for the era.
But in fact, the future is smaller but cleaner. Over the past 15 years, big iron has given way to servers powered by inexpensive microprocessors, cloud computing, ubiquitous mobile technology, and a movable feast of wireless networking. The result affords millions of technology users a pervasive presence. When that identity intersects with corporate networks, IT departments must draw on new resources and collaborate with business leaders to ensure everyone on the bus is rolling at peak efficiency toward corporate goals.
Like the PC itself, many of the great disruptions in enterprise IT have come from the bottom—and some chief information officers never saw them coming. Here are some of the tectonic technology shifts that suggest everything we knew in 1998 was wrong.
