IN SEARCH OF THE SILVER BULLET by W H Inmon

IN SEARCH OF THE SILVER BULLET
By W H Inmon
As a kid, it was always exciting to see the lone ranger ride through the west and chase bad guys Saturday morning at the movies. The William Tell Overture music would play, the lone ranger’s mighty horse would rear up on its hind legs, the lone ranger would peer into the prairie and you knew some bad guy was in trouble. You see, the lone ranger shot silver bullets and the silver bullets never missed. The bad guys shot just regular bullets and they never hit. So the world suddenly became enthralled with magic of silver bullets. At least little boys on Saturday mornings with overactive imaginations at the theater did.
IT management is forever looking for the silver bullet. And have there been some silver bullets in the history of IT? The answer is yes – interestingly there have been some amazing silver bullets in the short history of IT.
Consider Grace Hopper and COBOL. Think what the world would be like today if everyone had to program in assembler or even machine language. If there ever was a silver bullet, the creation of a language more concise and understandable than assembler or machine language was a real silver bullet.
Or consider Gene Amdahl and the IBM system 360. Once upon a time every computer required its own individual, unique coding. With Gene Amdahl and the 360, code was transferable from one computer to the next. If that wasn’t a silver bullet I don’t know what one was.
Or consider Ed Yourdon and structured programming and structured analysis. Once upon a time you just sat down and started writing code. There was no thought given to the general shape and structure of the code. Ed Yourdon told us that there needed to be an overall structure to the work that we were producing. Ed’s contributions were a Godsend.
So there have been some very real silver bullets in the short history of technology.
And today the IT manager is furiously looking for the next silver bullet. Things are in a mess. There never is enough time. There is not enough budget or people. Maintenance coding is eating up the budget. The end user is screaming bloody murder. The dog has bitten you on the way to work and traffic was just awful and it was raining. What today’s IT manager needs is the silver bullet. The new technological advance that will make everything right and problems will suddenly fade away. With the magical silver bullet all problems will suddenly and magically disappear.
Now vendors know that silver bullets are what sells. Vendors know that if they package their technology cleverly enough that the technology can be passed off as the next silver bullet. And nothing sells like a silver bullet.
So what are some of the silver bullets that are being sold today?
One of them is big data. Big data came into the world as if it were the savior to all problems large and small. Big data was sold as a genuine magical silver bullet. Companies bought big data not because they needed it but because their competition was buying it. And that sales approach is a sure sign of a silver bullet being sold.
Another silver bullet that is popular today is AI and machine learning. It may surprise people that AI has been around for years. What changes over time is not the words “AI” but the underlying technologies that are being sold as AI.
Another silver bullet is blockchain. We are told that with blockchain that “everything changes”. Again another sign of a silver bullet.
So what happens to silver bullets that are not silver bullets at all, but just repurposed vendor hype? False silver bullets fall prey to the phenomenon known as the Gartner hype curve. At first the technology is hyped. The expectations for the technology are set impossibly high. Then the technology is bought and enters the marketplace. It is at this point that people discover the reality of the technology, away from the hype. The product falls into the trough of disappointment.  At this point expectations for the technology sink. Then slowly, over time, on its own merits the technology rises to its true level of expectation in the marketplace. The true level is determined not by vendors selling the product, but by users making use of the technology.
So why are IT managers so susceptible to this cycle of magical silver bullets and vendor hype? There are a lot of reasons for the susceptibility.
One of them is the fact that in the past there really have been real silver bullets. And there are silver bullets today. But those bullets are not sold by vendors for the most part.
Another reason IT managers go for the silver bullet trick is that they don’t want to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. To solve many of the problems facing IT today, the manager requires ingenuity, patience, innovation, risk taking, and cooperation. And managers just do not have an appetite for this kind of effort. They would much rather just buy their way out of their problems.
One of the signs of maturity of the IT profession is that there are starting to be a few IT managers who are willing to put in the effort required to get at the root of problems. Thank God for these managers. And over time the fascination with the silver bullet will fade.
This transition of IT managers to a new level of enlightenment is all part of the maturing of the IT profession. It is happening a manager at a time. Slowly. Glacially slowly. But it is happening.
Whoever said evolutions was suppose to be fast and easy?
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Bill's latest books are TURNING TEXT INTO GOLD, Technics Publications, HEARING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER, Technics Publications, and DATA ARCHITECTURE:SECOND EDITION, Elsevier Publications. Bill's company - Forest Rim Technology reads raw text and turns that text into a standard data base. Bill is based in Denver, Colorado.