What if the unthinkable happens, and we do not adopt autonomic computing or similar technology? This nightmarish scenario hardly bears consideration.
Mixtures of the following events will happen with different severity.
Complexity will continue to increase, reaching unmanageable proportions.
Further pressures will increase on IT staff to fix unfixable problems.
Reliability of systems and performance will deteriorate. Businesses will suffer.
Corporations will lose their competitive edge and lose substantial markets and profits.
Corporations will be required to increase their IT budgets to astronomical proportions.
Senior management will reject these astronomical budget requests—the cycle of problems will continue.
More and more skilled IT staff will be needed at substantial costs.
The health of many IT staff will suffer.
Chaos.
The IT industry has lingered too long in the religion of overspecialization, in which integration was just another specialty. The IT industry has made spectacular progress in almost every aspect of computing. But it has not made enough in the one area that now counts most: dealing with the complexity generated by all the systems we have installed so far. In this heady rush, there is a danger of losing sight of the very people who use IT and who have come to depend on us for increased productivity and improvement in many aspects of their daily lives. We've made it unnecessarily difficult for them to tap the potential we've promised them. It's time for this to change. It must change. Chaos is not an option.
This next era of computing will enable progress and abilities we can barely envision today. But the best measure of our success will be when our customers do not think about the functioning of computing systems.
