The Shifting Paradigm

In the mid-90's I made the move from CoBOL programmer to C++ programmer. This was a recognition that "big iron" was going away and I better get my skills up to speed or I'd be flipping burgers at McDonald's before too long. Of course Big Iron is still with us and CoBOL is still the most used language in business applications today. That not withstanding I still made the move.

My first forays into C++ were interesting. I learned the syntax, I read the ARM and recognized that Bjarne Stroustroup was both a genius and a rock star and I started coding my heart out in my first object oriented language. The farce though was that while I was saving all my files with a ".cpp" extension I was essentially writing C code. I was a structured programmer and the idea that object oriented programming was more than just a different language, but a different paradigm. The idea that an object was a piece of code that encapsulated both behavior and data didnt sink in for almost 2 years. At that time I felt that 18 months to 2 years was about how long it took a good structured programmer to become a proficient OO Developer. I have had no reason to review that impression in almost 10 years but I'm sure it still holds.

Of course developers coming out of school these days may never have had any exposure to any programming paradigm other than Object Oriented and so the shift is not necessary. Unfortunately this might create a blind spot in other areas.
The phenomena of Social Media has taken hold and the tools that are used in Social Media are becoming ubiquitous. RSS Feeds, Blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc are widely available and in use however, just as in C++, there is a paradigm shift afoot that involves more than just the adoption of a new set of tools. The true power of social media is not the individual's use of these tools but the collective use of the "society" and their use of the tools. What can be learned from the patterns of use and the content that's accessed and the searches that are undertaken can all be aggregated into an incredible amount of knowledge that will inform each of us as individuals and direct our work and gathering of knowledge in a way that has not been possible through technology ever before in history. The age of the individual will be powered and enabled by the behavior of the masses.

In 2006 Gartner published an article on the state of the worker in 2015. That worker would no longer be stuck in a cubicle using standard office software on a standard issue laptop but would be an individual with little or no allegiance to the corporation he worked for. This sort of individuality, counter intuitively, can only be achieved efficiently by the corporation providing the worker with the content he or she needs to connect to the company. This content can only be delivered by mining the content contributed by these individuals and delivering a coherent viewing of that data.

The era of Social Media, coupled with the ever increasing bandwidth we experience across the world, will be a game changer not only in IT but in the way companies employ their work force.