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Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

In any revolutionary technology, the pace of change is overestimated in the short run, and the magnitude of change is underestimated in the long run.

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Software is a gas. It expands to fill its container...After all, if we hadn't brought your processor to its knees, why else would you get a new one?

Computers are great at making information cheaper and cheaper, but it takes humans to respond and act on that data. For most tasks, you still need a person in the loop. But humans can also be a bottleneck. We have more demand and overload on our cognitive abilities, and that prevents technology from being as effective as it can be.

Technology by itself can't make a company or leader great. The role of technology is to accelerate greatness that's already there, not to build greatness in the first place.

The technologies of deception are increasing more rapidly than the technologies of verification. Now we have really powerful tools for deceiving one another.

Technology and business are necessarily out of phase in the cycle of things. When a business is performing well, it's based on a technology from yesterday. Unfortunately, our future activities in technology are guided by the success of today. There's a mismatch. The seeds of destruction are planted at the peak of success. History is often the worst enemy in charting the future.

You can view the evolution of technology...as the shift from process automation to practice enhancement. In the past couple of decades, the primary focus of IT investment certainly by large enterprises has been to automate and standardize the core operating processes of the business. The net result is, if you look at where the headcount of the enterprise is focused, it is on handling exceptions that get thrown out by the automated processes, and that can't be handled by the rules or procedures that have been specified. The real opportunity for technology now is to help people to address the exceptions -- it's typically more than one person, and it involves finding the right people, bringing them together quickly, giving them the tools necessary to address the exception, and then, probably most importantly, to create a record of the exception-handling so that you can see patterns emerge of where these exceptions are occurring over time. That's a huge opportunity for technology.

...One of the limitations we have seen of service-oriented architectures is that most of the investment and thinking around this has been very enterprise-centric. But if you look at where most of the exceptions emerge, they are in the business processes that span multiple enterprises -- in supply-chain activities or customer relationship management, or the coordination of distribution channels or channel partners. That requires a very different lens for viewing IT architectures.

For each technological revolution to flourish, you need a lot of new investment in infrastructure. If you don't have railroads, who can build locomotives? If you don't have roads or electricity, how can you sell cars or refrigerators? But if you don't have enough cars or refrigerators, you can't justify the roads or power plants. The solution comes through asset inflation. As money flows into new technological stocks, investors make capital gains by reselling them. It doesn't matter if there are no profits or dividends yet - the money keeps coming. Many of the canals and railways of the manias in the 18th and 19th centuries were completed years after their stock market boom ended, and many of the dot-com and telecom companies never realized any benefit from their investment. But the frenzy left enough infrastructure in place for everyone to benefit.

When we think about technology, we immediately think about invention and innovation and the future, and not about how things come into use. We're always so enthusiastic about what's going to happen in five or 10 years' time. But we lack an explicit history of technology, by which I mean a history of the vast number of products that are in use at any particular time - as well as a history of innovation, outlining all of the inventions (large and small) from a particular period. Instead we have an unsatisfactory mixture of the two, leaving us with little more than excitable descriptions of the early life of some of the earth-shattering technologies that later became widely used.

That's a major gap, because if we're interested in the relationship between technology and society, we need to know what's in use and what advances are being made throughout a culture at any particular time. And it is just as important to understand the inventions that failed as it is to study those that succeeded.

The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things.

A good architecture has a number of important characteristics. It is modular, allowing sections to be tagged, stored, and applied in different products. It is built on standards, providing for easier integration. It is configurable, letting one system serve many customer requirements. And it is updatable, allowing new features to be implemented without any need to discard large parts of older releases.