A safe way to mix pleasure with business; 3 lessons that movies can teach about IT. One Big Data tale.

Probably most of you have had the frustration or pleasure to watch a remake of a classic movie, or maybe, if you are millennial, classical movies are just “NEW” movies. There are 3 things that I’ve learned from movies that apply to IT:
1. We invariably try to “remake” technologies/movies, because they are really good or now is the moment to open the door to new possibilities;
2. Some classics (technologies/movies) you will never be able to reproduce or improve on;
3. In many cases, the “critics’ opinion and market hype” are more important than (technologies/movies) themselves;
In today’s world, we often are not inventing, we are actually RE-inventing and/or improving concepts, especially in IT and in the movie industry. Sometimes the remake of a movie is better than the original. For example, I like the “new” Thomas Crown Affair better than the original (classic). But in some cases, the classic is so good that it is difficult, if not impossible, to improve on, like the movie Casablanca.

IT in many aspects is like a movie; full of remakes and reinventions. Similarly, IT in many ways is really the same, just with different names and buzzwords such as “big data” and “cloud computing”.

Recently, in an article entitled Big Data Expertise Much Tougher to Fake, written by Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, he explored how Google has created a new way to analyze huge stores of data (Cloud Dataflow). He mentioned in the article one of the big limitations around Hadoop technology’s inability to do “batch” operations, which means ordering a computer to perform an operation in bulk and then waiting for the result. You might ask a mainframe to process a company’s payroll as a batch job, or in a more contemporary example, analyze all the search terms that people in Texas typed into Google last Tuesday. Here again, we have
the Mainframe concepts rising from the ashes.

My first job, more than 15 years ago, was as a Mainframe Cobol developer. I still remember my IT friends saying, “My God! Cobol is dead, the future is in desktop applications (client - server)”. Still, for a time, I continued as a Cobol developer, but their comments remained in my head. I was spending my time and money on this, but would the technology change?
However, as time went by, I learned IT always changes and reinvents itself. With IT, we always have to study more and more, but the essence, like movies, doesn’t change that much and one day, just when the Mainframe concepts appeared to be dead, cloud computing and big data are here requesting higher capacity and batch processing.

Maybe, like the Thomas Crown Affair, the original, which is about a bank robbery, was perfect for its time, but the remake focused on the heist of a masterpiece and used new technology like the “Gartner” hype cycle. Sometimes, a classic (like mainframe) is so good that we embrace it, and accept that some classics never die or cannot be replicated (like Casablanca).

Don’t get me wrong, today I’m an enthusiast, advocate and provider of new technology in mainly three spheres, with my personal market hype:
• Motivate new generations of eager innovators;
• Reshape the way IT delivers fast business results;
• Create delightful customer experience;

In fact, “don’t (always) believe the hype”: classics serve as the basis for present and future innovations.

Bye Bye Hadoop? Or just Wow… Cloud Dataflow.

Yes, life is a loop!!! IT is a loop!!! And I love IT.