Early in school we get taught gravity and hear about the founding fathers of physics, such as Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Maxwell and Einstein. Would you be taken serious as a scientist without a thorough understanding of the history of your science? Or philosophy without Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and Kant?

IT today is mostly consumption culture

In my experience when talking to most people working or teaching IT, it seems common to wax lyrical about the concept of the day (cloud computing anyone?), a computer language, a particular product in a vein not dissimilar from having consumer preferences such as phones, cars, music or wine: all hype with a vision that is about 1 sentence deep.

Contrasting with the 1950s

Let’s contrast this with John McCarthy – the person you undoubtedly recognised in the picture above. He was the first to define ‘AI’ in 1955 and foresaw that computer services would be a utility just like town water, and that we would be able to get advice from that service. Sounds familiar? He also invented ‘garbage collection’ so a computer doesn’t run out of memory after he created the language Lisp.

LISP – 60 years in use and counting – why?

Lisp is often partially written in itself, and can modify or to its own code – which made it a prospect for AI programming. It is still in use 60 years later, getting renewed interest after 2000 for more general use. It has a beautiful elegant design in my view. Lisp’s design also formed the bases of a powerful new language, Clojure which Rick Hickey wrote it in 1 year. Just contrast Lisp’s lifespan to any IT product you have seen in the last 20 years. Why would that be – what is different?

A holistic viewpoint can give extraordinary results

Let’s move on to a founding father of IT, Douglas Engelbart. He tasked himself during the 1960s with using computers to augment the collective human intellect to better face the wave of new problems that humanity would encounter. He developed a software environment with his research team and studied themselves in using it, so they could improve the systems that they developed – and progress towards his vision.

This effort resulted in a system that could be programmed in itself, had version control, email, keyword ranked search, bootstrapping, hyperlinks that were overlaid, split screen document viewing, collaborative document editing and picture in picture video conferencing. Further, unlike browser today, you could also have different views on a ‘webpage’: for instance it could show the first 2 lines of each paragraph that contained a search criteria. It could also have a different view for a printed format. We know how well webpage print these day, don’t we?

So fundamental research with a vision over a relatively short period, with normal budgets produced results that you’ll be hard-pressed to find today. To me, it highlights that IT has now been reduced to merely watered-down engineering based on the science of the 50s and 60. In the best case companies were able to pull one feature from the whole and sell it: The earlier years of Google’s search looked a lot like what was demo-ed in 1968.

Leading Tech – yet still falling short of a 1968 product

Google docs is a similar story: Engelbert’s team integrated word processing, graphics editing and paragraphs could originate from different authors and linked to precisely (the view could be defined), for example from an email or help documents. Did you ever question why we need Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook as separate programs with different menus and why it’s impossible to find some functions without the internet?

Conclusion – viewpoint on any problem/domain is crucial

So then, standing here with the above under our belt, we can see that having and pursuing a holistic viewpoint can bring us results of a different magnitude, beyond incremental. In fact, it’s nice to quote Alan Kay (inventor of object-oriented language ‘Smalltalk’) here: ‘the correct viewpoint adds 80 IQ points’. It also in my experience tends to reduce the amount of work by several factors.

The real difference in viewpoint comes though in how solutions scale and stand the test of time. Can they easily adapt to new requirements? Do they remain maintainable? Our experience is that good solutions, easily adapt and with little effort. Poor solutions need complete overhauls, rewrites, get mired in bugs and generally dictate a compromised way of working for your staff. Good solutions come from good designers with powerful viewpoints: they solve essences and create frameworks in which details fall in place easily – also over time.

Our viewpoint – and how we can help you

We never look at a problem without inspecting the full context. We are here to be that trusted partner for your school to for you to develop a more powerful vision and technology platform, and we can help support the cultural change that may needed.

Our project approach typically follows these 4 points:
(1) thoroughly understand the issue and goals – we speak both ‘School’ and ‘IT’
(2) abstract the issues into a set of organisation and technical problems and goals
(3) design new end-end organisational workflows tailored to your school
(4) design a technical framework in which all problems can be easily solved

The reason that very little else works is that in order to reach a higher, holistically solved problems, you simply need higher-level viewpoints with corresponding tools.

Examples of extremely powerful but simple solutions: the internet

Did you know that that internet has been up since 1969, never ever went down and yet replaced all its parts, probably several times? It runs on 20.000 lines of code – and it could probably be done under 2000. Microsoft Office is 100M+ lines, to contrast that number.

The reason for the code size, that it scaled million times in size since and that it never went down for maintenance or failures, was that the internet was designed by people who did know what they were doing and chose an architecture that suited the problem domain. To remain in Alan Kay’s type of analogy, they used stones to create an architected cathedral, not to lump together a pyramid. Do you employ bricklayers and architects?

The embedded invitation

So where does this leave us? Well part of it, is a round-about invitation to view the state of technology around you from a different perspective. It is also an invitation to read up on the holistic concepts and ideas that our ‘IT elders’ had and see which of their concepts and ideas can be utilised today. I am pretty sure Douglas Engelbart will smile (from above) with delight if you’d take up the baton of progressing humanity – and schools who are on the forefront of that will inevitable pass this on to the future through their students.

Our related services

• Opportunities audit report (review all school workflows)
• Strategic IT planning
• Product selection and Implementation
• Systems Integration & Automation
• End-End Project Support