Enterprise Biology

Saturday, November 04, 2006

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An enterprise is like a living body. Different departments become its organs and appendages. Some can live without the other and some
cannot. For this organic enterprise, IT is the analogue of the brain. If you go in deeper, the brain is a cluster of neuron synapses that process electronic signals not unlike a huge cluster of computers in a data center.

Consider the sheer volume of processing that's being done 24x7 in this natural data center! Unlike your IT data center, the brain cannot be 'shutdown' for maintenance. There are no patches to security holes and no reboots to solve problems. If a 'network cable' is out in the brain, there is plenty to go haywire but precious little you can do to fix it. Best of all, there is no 'OS'-or still, there is one that is so powerful that it is omnipresent.

Sujay V Sarma Issue Editor for this month

What stores information about your friends and associates? Well, how exactly do you manage to 'remember'? What part of your brain is the processor and where begins the memory?

Mathematics, Biology, Endocrinology, Mechanical and Kinetic Physics, Organic Chemistry, Nutritional Science, languages and a zillion other capabilities come built-in with the brain. And the one thing that sets humans apart from animals-the capability to analyze, innovate and invent. The brain is a factor to the very hope of evolution of the species. A blue screen failure here will certainly mean a black screen of death or even species-level extinction and without a hope of recovery with a simple reboot.

Look also at the raw power of this neural data center. From the thousands (or millions) of sensor points in the body, signals reach the brain about
different things. Some tell the brain you feel pain, while others signal the need for nourishment. Still others indicate how far you have moved a single finger in response to a previous command. This is processed, compared, analyzed, stored and new commands issued instantaneously. So much of the functionality is autonomous and so much is manual. And so much can go wrong.

Yet, the human mind lives on for a hundred years. Yet, it fights through adversities of weather, differences in water and food, it lives through Tsunamis and wars and 9/11s. Prince's mind worked all the while from falling into the well to the time he was rescued after 60 hours or so, even though he was of so young an age. It finds the time and resources to imagine and dream. To conceptualize and visualize the abstract. To theorize about things it cannot even see or fathom-matters of Theology and Cosmic Science. Its memory is impressive, with the ability to recall audio, video and even the tiniest bit of information like the fragrance your wife wore when you first met her, all at the merest brush of a hint of a thought about that event. Yet, Sergey Brin or Larry Page never got their hands on your brain.

When I run an enterprise sometime, I don't want to copy the giants out there to perfection. I want to copy the human body. And with it, I want the power of the human brain to run its IT. Things to help me on are already out there. More and more software are becoming resistant to frequent crashes. Long uptimes are the order of the day rather than being an exception. With the launch of multi-core processors, more applications and more powerful ones at that can run better on my servers. Search has become even more resilient and placed itself firmly at the heart of everything from Internet browsing to managing my knowledge warehouse. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, Dual Layer DVDs, WiMAX and Mobile WiMAX (or even 802.11n), Serial SCSI, SOA, SaaS, Virtualization, Consolidation, ... the list is long of the things that are enabling that organic enterprise brain-like IT for me.

The only thing the brain lacks is perhaps the ability to connect with other brains directly-a sort of a neural hypernet. Some of this is overcome with the capability to speak and communicate visually or by writing it down. A computer can only send data to a computer of the future, and it must leave interpretation of that data to the future computer. The human brain can express explicitly what it felt about that data. The cave paintings and scrolls from history are a testament to that.

Imagine IT like that.

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