How OT became separated from IT

Or... "The parable of the tribes"

Once upon a time there was a tribe of people. Their ancestors were hunter gatherers, but now this tribe had discovered “agriculture” and were farmers. Each year they would sow and reap, store the harvest and try to survive the winter. Sometimes the harvest was good; sometimes not. A few of the farmers got to pondering if there was a way to improve the harvest or at least make it a bit more predictable. The problem was that it was hard to remember what worked last year, let alone five years ago, so the results were patchy.

One clever member of the tribe made a suggestion. What if we make marks on clay one year and then, the following year, we can look at these marks and it would help us to remember? And so the guild of scribes was born.

Many years passed. Now the people weren’t just farmers, they were wheelwrights and doctors, lawyers and shipbuilders, millers and teachers. The guild of scribes, who once were powerful, were now relegated to “typing” and “filing”, but the basic concept of making marks on something to help you to remember was still A Good Thing. It was a bit slow, though, so although the wheelwrights talked to each other all day about the wheels they were building, scribes only tended to make marks about how many wheels they’d made at the end of the month. Once a year, other scribes who were good with numbers would add them up and make some very special marks and call it an “annual report”.

One day some people came from another tribe. They wore long robes and conical hats and had long white beards and had staves made of wood. “We have made a Wondrous Machine? that does the work of many scribes” they intoned. “It can remember so much more than the marks you make - and…” this with a real flourish “it can add up numbers faster than a person!”. “Give us some of your crops and we will share our machine with you”.

The people were happy. Now they could remember almost everything. They liked to talk about “Information Technology” instead of making marks on clay. They spoke of “Databases” and “Systems of Record”. Oh, the things they could keep track of now! Human resources, physical resources, financial resources and all of these different things required different instructions and databases on the “Wondrous Machine” (WM?), but that was ok.

Until it wasn’t… Until the day that the people wanted to compare the human, physical and financial resources. “The way that your WM? remembers things is different from the way mine does!”. “How can I say how many wheelwrights I have and how much does each one cost to make a wheel?”.

Another splinter group from the conical hat tribe had a solution. “Give us some more of your crops and we will make the different machines talk to each other”. “We will integrate your systems!”.?The people were impressed. Not only did they have machines that could remember everything (albeit in different ways): now they had people who could speak the language of many WM?s and make them talk to each other.

What about the wheelwrights (and millers and shipbuilders) whilst this was going on? They were getting on with their jobs - actually making things - and starting to use the WM?s for their own purposes - especially as they were now small and didn’t cost as much in the way of crops. They could use them for keeping track of how the operations for making a wheel were going, how hot the rim was when fitted and then, since the small WM?s could talk over the air (imagine!), they let the wheelwrights know how much vibration the wheel was experiencing right now!

Some of the people were interested in these new sources of information. How can we relate the vibration of an individual wheel from the little WM?s to the record(s) we have about the wheel in our old, large WM?s? (They wondered). It’s a bit of a problem (they discovered), because the wheel sends us lots of little bits of information over time and our other information about the wheel is in lots of our old systems as individual records and the two don’t really fit together.

Right on cue the conical hats show up again. “Behold!”, they bellowed, “we have made a magical lake wherein you can keep your information as if it were shoals of fishes”.

The people were beginning to get a bit fed up with the conical-hat crew. However, they put up with them and did behold the magical lakes with wonder, “wonder”-ing how they would find the information “fishes" that were related to the mythical wheel and how they would make sense of them when they did. They also put up with the fact that they now needed even more conical hat people - some to put the information in the lake and some more to make sense of what was put in there.

The plight of the people got worse when they had to cooperate with other tribes and share the information in their lakes. “I’m not letting you fish in my lake - you might pull out the wrong type of fish - everything I know is in there”.

All this time, unnoticed by the people, another tribe had been living as hermits in the cloud forest at the top of the nearby mountains. They watched the plight of the people as their methods got more and more complicated. They muttered about a better way as they tended their juniper bushes. They espoused a radical creed of data-centricity and semantics and were shunned.?

Eventually the hermits started to talk to the more enlightened “integrators of systems”. “What if,” the hermits argued, “you could fashion a simulacrum of the wheel or mill or farm or whatever, that…”, (pause for effect) “liveth in the clouds?”.

The hermits had fashioned some of these simulacra using only their fingers. They called them “digital twins” for that reason.?They pressed on with their reasoning. “What if you could find these twins because they were self-describing?”. “What if - the twins not only had information about the thing but also the current state and/or whereabouts of the thing?”. “What if you could poke the twin-of-the-wheel in the cloud and the real wheel-on-the-ground would move?”. “What if…” (drumroll) “you could share the twins with other tribes that you trusted?”.?

The integrators-of-systems were not stupid: “Won’t this mean giving more crops to the conical hats?” they enquired. The hermits had a few answers (as they had been thinking about this for a long time). “If the description of the twins is good, the WM?s can do a lot of the integration work themselves meaning you don’t have to pay the conical-hats to do it”. “You will be able to find information yourselves faster than the other tribes.”. “You will be able to cooperate with other tribes on large projects without giving up all the secrets of your tribe”.

Then one year a plague was upon the tribes. “How shall we cooperate with the other tribes to find a cure?” they cried. “How can we share the results of our remedies?”. Then, the next year, came a great drought and the crops failed. “The climate is changing - how shall we cooperate to become more sustainable?”

The tribes had to change their ways. It was slow at first, as the old ways of keeping their information separate and hidden had been passed down the generations, but some brave souls were trying the new methods, sometimes in conjunction with the old; sometimes breaking with the past completely. They found that they had easier and quicker ways of solving their old problems (that also meant they didn’t have to give up so many of their crops) and now they could tackle the pressing problems that they never thought they could.