In September 1962, John F. Kennedy articulated his now famous vision that launched the US space program: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade.” These words launched a space race that culminated in Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk seven years later, on July 20, 1969. The full text of Kennedy’s 1962 speech reveals that his space challenge was part of a larger theme, namely, the dizzying pace of technology. change that is harnessed for the future. Kennedy’s was just one of several visions of scientific progress in the 1960s that would transform the world.
Another was a powerful prediction that completely changed the technology industry and its economy. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founding fathers of the computer industry (he co-founded Intel), created one of the best-known principles in the field of IT. Moore’s Law predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. He further promised lower costs and greater innovation as a direct result.
To maintain the status quo in today’s marketplace, it is imperative that business leaders develop proactive strategies for technology and data management based on Moore’s prediction, including: 1) Invest wisely: Find the right strategic partners; 2) Start small, learn and get some early gains; 3) Organize for success; and 4) Think differently about data.
For forty years, the industry has focused on the cost/productivity side of Moore’s prediction, for the most part ignoring his subtler but also more powerful message about the accelerating pace of innovation. In hindsight, it’s no surprise that the pace of innovation and our growing appetite for technology have increased overall IT costs. This is now creating pressure on operating plans and tension between CIOs and CFOs of corporations whose CEOs expected IT costs to drop due to populist beliefs about the IT industry’s trajectory.
The availability of better technology and the insights it makes possible are what fuel our growing appetite for data. Businesses today collect more data than ever before; they use powerful algorithms to find patterns in it to solve all kinds of real-life problems that had no solution before. A 2008 study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) projected that, by 2010, the world would create more than 1,200 exabytes of data (an exabyte is one quintillion bytes of data). This projection proved true, forcing retailers and manufacturers of fast-moving consumer goods to become increasingly adept at finding new insights in big amounts of data. Historically, data was aggregated because the complexity of the queries required it, or because disaggregated data did not exist or was too expensive.
Traditionally, companies have used data to understand what happened yesterday or today. To compete in the market, data is now used to predict what will happen in the future. To do so, companies are increasingly capturing disaggregated data in real time and analyzing information flows in real time, improving their ability to accurately forecast the future. In his books The Power of Now and The Power to Predict, Vivek Ranadive describes an evolution over time toward event-driven business models where the need for real-time information is creating a “data explosion.” Ranadive reaffirms that CPU, memory and storage costs have fallen over the last 40 years as Moore predicted, but the costs to store and process exponentially increasing amounts of data, and the need for smart people to analyze it, have risen at the same rate. . This is the paradox of Moore’s Law.
As companies consider strategies for managing and producing data, there are multiple needs to meet. At The Nielsen Company, our goal is to provide our clients with direct access to real-time disaggregated data, enabling them to better predict the future results of their businesses. We proactively invest in products and processes that truly differentiate our business and enable our customers to combine data in ways never before possible. Recognizing that no company has the human or financial capital to go it alone, we foster strategic partnerships with world-class hardware and software companies to help us achieve our vision. Our approach is to start small, learn fast, fail faster, get a few wins, and apply what you learn. We ignore organizational boundaries, assembling empowered teams that are rewarded for innovation, quality, and speed. Our culture embodies a relentless focus on the quality and timeliness of the data we provide to clients.
Moore’s Law foresaw an era of increased innovation, the details of which were understandably fuzzy in the 1960s. Today, innovation drives customers to demand insights ever faster and to collect more and more data in real time. To keep up with this demand, IT departments have to spend more, despite lower component costs and higher performance. At the end of the day, Moore’s Law, which has been a catalyst for great transformation in business, government, and science, may require a reinterpretation.
When Kennedy articulated his vision for space in 1962, he recognized that the journey would not be without risk. He recognized that we were entering areas that were not well understood. Just three years later, before the microprocessor existed, Gordon Moore made an equally compelling prediction that would define the modern history of technology. Fast forward to today: Despite the visible achievements of the last forty years, the future of the US space program seems somewhat uncertain. The technology industry, which has also enjoyed four decades of unprecedented growth, thanks in part to Gordon Moore, is now venturing into uncharted territory as we begin to address the accelerating demand for real-time disaggregated data.
