Alaskan Welcome

Fairbanks, Alaska

Well I lied. I said that I wouldn't be blogging from Alaska, but I just can't resist it.

We had a great tip up here. Everything was nominal, no problems, no delays, no lost baggage. I had been a bit apprehensive about holiday mobs based on the news reports over the weekend, but we didn't encounter any of that.

We arrived in Alaska with an appropriate greeting. We saw a brilliant aurora before descending through the clouds. We saw our first snow in more than three years. Dave was waiting for us at the terminal with jackets, gloves and hats. When we emerged in to the parking lot, the temperature was exactly zero F (-18C). It felt brisk, not bitter. Since we got here at about 01:00, we haven't had much time yet for the family reunion.

Having not traveled for a while, I was struck by how refined the computer automation has become. On the way up, our cell phone gave us flight status updates. When we dropped off the rental car, the lady attendant greeted me as Mr Mills as soon as I opened the door, then she handed my my receipt for the final bill as I stepped out. At the curb, the skycap not only checked our bags, but he handed us our three boarding passes each for the trip. Those boarding passes included information on the gate assignments in the remote cities. At the gate, the attendant scanned the bar codes on the boarding passes and her machine flashed our names to her.

Of course none of that stuff is entirely new. It has been coming for a very long time. The part that struck me was how ubiquitous and how so seemingly effortless the IT automation has become. If not perfected, it is highly refined.

What contributed to this IT success after so many decades of failures and compromise systems, of which I had participated? It seems now that we have achieved the benefits of automation foreseen in the 1950s that I studied in college. I wish I knew what the fraction of the GDP is spent on IT today compared to 10, 20, or 30 years ago. I wager that it is lower than before, yet we get much more out of it.

So what's the secret? I think, no secret at all. Software technology benefits from the cumulative effect of incremental improvements, year by year. There are better tools, better methods (i.e. Objects), plus data base architectures refined over years of use. I imagine that the incremental improvements will continue indifinitely.