T.M.I. means Goodbye, IT Dept.

The BizTech blog says:

It's official: There's too much information. . . .

We’ve hit information overload: The amount of data people create now exceeds the amount of space available to store them.

People sent emails, took digital pictures, processed credit cards and generally did things that collectively created 281 exabytes of data by the end 2007, according to the research company IDC.

We also laughed when we read this:

(“Exabyte” sounds made up, but it’s a real term meaning 1,000,000,000,000 megabytes.)

Who knew?

Also from the BizTech blog today: IBM is intensifying its cloud computing efforts. It's bypassing corporate IT departments and going right to the business units, in effect cutting out the inefficient and entrenched middle man, but not the middle man you'd think.

Rod Smith, an IBM vice president, says he’s starting to sell his “mashup” software, which makes it possible to combine data from multiple systems, directly to workers. . . .

. . . on a sliding scale where the traditional approach of setting up sales meetings with the head of IT is a “1” and the Google model is a “10,” Smith says his group is now a “7.”

Bottom line: The network is the computer. And we need more bandwidth.