Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other.

Bill Gates wrote this back in 1999; since then we’ve come a long way. Moore’s Law has held firm for almost 40 years longer than originally predicted and with it the dazzling amount of computation power and storage capacity easily acquired by businesses has increased with exponential growth. But as Gates implied, the law works both ways, “information technology and business” have grown in capacity together. The amount of computing power delivered by a $500 laptop now makes the neon-lit, fan-cooled desktop monsters of my youth look positively primitive. With the massive growth in computational capacity, the need of businesses to make sense of their petabytes of messy data has perhaps swelled even faster. As storage has ballooned, and collected data has filled it, a void has developed that I intend to fill: this data must be transformed into coherent and meaningful business ideas in a timely and efficient manner.