Foreword
A funny thing has happened to business over the last 30 years. In many cases, technology has become the face of the company, both for internal clients and all the way out to the end customer. Tracking shipments through Fedex.com? Ordering books at Amazon.com? That interface is the business. Meanwhile, in the same time frame, a funny thing has happened to technology—the success of implementations hinges more on human behavior and well-executed processes than the performance of development languages and database design.
I can fairly say I was there when the business world began to discover data, a key factor in today's high valuation of technology. When I first started in IT, mainframes hummed away in a darkened room, and we worked behind a curtain of mystique, automating traditional business processes for technologically unsophisticated users. But as time moved on, projects grew more complex and strategic. During my days as a senior executive and CIO, I helped introduce FedEx's worldwide package-tracking system, oversaw the implementation of AT&T and Sprint's customer billing and marketing systems and drove the technology strategy as Wellpoint grew from an $18 billion to $76 billion health insurance giant.
Fast-forward a few years, and we reach the age of the Internet, rampant mobilization and new computing architectures like cloud computing—not to mention steady progress in database design and programming languages—to the point where today, technology has never been more ...
