As I was clearing out my computer over the Christmas break I stumbled across these images that literally blew my mind. In 1956, it took an army of people, planes, trains, and automobiles to transport 5Mb storage from one location to another. Today, it would take 200,000 of those monster drives to hold the same amount of data as a $100 1Tb SSD disk the size of your fingertip. Thankfully, only a thousand IBM 305 RAMAC systems were built and sold for $160,000 in 195 (that’s $1.3m today’s money). A textbook example of digital innovation: dematerialize (make smaller), demonetize (make cheaper), and democratize (make accessible).
So, storage is cheap, commoditized, and cloud-based. Digitization has successfully pulled vast amounts of data from across the enterprise and consolidated it onto various digital media formats held on smart storage solutions. Digital transformation has helped make data accessible everywhere.
However, we are still evolving. We are now entering the Intelligent transformation era. Making data accessible useful and useable requires understanding. Hence, the increased focus on artificial intelligence and data science to accelerate gleaning insights from data. In doing so, we can scale making smarter and faster decisions with confidence.
Really looking forward to what humans and technology will accomplish together in 2021, with the right focus.
