- Glitches Are More Than Inconveniences
- What's Behind the Glitches?
- Loss of Intellectual Knowledge
- Market Consolidation
- The Ubiquity of Technology
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What's Behind the Glitches?
Given how much technology has evolved, we have to ask why these software glitches continue to happen. Why are we seeing more glitches instead of fewer? And now that technology is pervasive in our business and personal lives, how do we make sure that we're not the cause or the victim of one of these hidden threats that may take days, weeks, or months to unravel?
Flight delays, banking errors, and inaccurate record keeping are just some of the millions of glitches that affect consumers and businesses all over the world. However, when you consider the amount of technology that's in place at companies of every size all over the world, it's easy to see how these glitches make their way into our computer systems. We've already seen the effects of these types of glitches. What will be different in the future is that they will be more widespread and affect more people due to our increased connectedness and reliance on technology. The result will be more costly and time-consuming outages because the glitches will be harder to detect among the millions of lines of software code that allow us to connect to the office and with our friends all over the globe.
How did we get to this point, and why am I convinced that these issues and many like them will, in fact, happen? The simple answer is that many IT professionals have unwittingly created an industry so hyper-focused on the next big thing that we have taken some shortcuts in the creation of solid foundations—otherwise known in the IT world as infrastructures—that will firmly support us in the future. In these situations, the actions that lead to these glitches are not deliberate. What typically happens is that shortcuts are taken during the software development process to accelerate product release cycles with the goal of boosting revenues. While that's the simple explanation, the issue obviously is more complex.
Three of the most pressing drivers are
- Loss of intellectual knowledge
- Market consolidation
- The ubiquity of technology
Although at first these may appear to be disparate forces, they actually are intertwined.