by Richard Pastore

Signpost: IT Boom Ahead

News
Oct 01, 20021 min
IT Leadership

In 2001, Silicon Valley companies erased all the profits earned during the previous eight years. So is the information revolution over?

In a word: No. So says W. Brian Arthur, the Citibank professor at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. At the CIO-100 Symposium in August, Arthur said it can take 40 years for technological revolutions to fully take hold. The car debuted in the early 1900s, but the explosion had to wait until interstate highways developed in the 1950s.

In IT terms, basic enablers such as the Web need to become invisible. “If history asserts itself, we are on the eve of a massive buildout,” Arthur said, adding that it will take five years to 15 years before we are as comfortable in the IT world as we are in cars.