Devil’s Bargain

You don’t really remember COBOL do you? There’s a good reason for that. Back when enterprises first started keeping databases, the only way you could use them was to have I.T. write a COBOL program to generate a report for you. As users realized the power of data, requests for new reports piled up faster than I.T. could handle, and the “COBOL problem” became the I.T. hot topic of the day.

Paradigm shift to the rescue. Around 1980, the spreadsheet came along letting users commandeer a little data for themselves and play around with it as they chose to do calcs, reports, models, whenever they wanted. COBOL came off the critical path, and went back to batch processing in the back office. Business agility and productivity soared.

The devil gets his due. Of course, this kind of user empowerment didn’t come for free. The cost was loss of data integrity, and governance, errors increased, file and version management became big issues. The COBOL problem turned into the spreadsheet problem.

The uneasy truce. Thirty five years later, we are still balancing user empowerment with information integrity. Desktop software, Web 2.0 and big data have given users tremendous power and flexibility, but the devil’s bargain hasn’t changed: Users don’t get to have data. It remains remote as SQL, XML or JSON, in clouds, lakes and fabrics in the land of I.T.

The final frontier. But why is it that we can only touch data indirectly through applications? Why does it have to be kept out of sight in arcane, domain-specific vaults so that adding new kinds of data is like rebuilding the pyramids? There used to be good reasons related to hardware, performance and the needs of development, but with today’s tech, it’s just a bad habit, and the devil hopes you won’t find out. There is no reason users can have direct custody of data. All of it, if they want to. Sounds simple, but it’s a disruptive change far bigger than spreadsheets were, and is the true definition of digital transformation.

Truenumbers. It’s a way of representing data as individual facts, self-described in a structured natural language. so what they are, and what they are about are entirely up to you. No silos because truenumbers can be about anything in any domain. Immutable, individually secure and portable, truenumbers enable data integrity, compliance, security and governance far better than any back office system, and which extend all the way to the edge. Even in your desktop documents and spreadsheets. The devil’s bargain is broken, which is better for I.T. too. No longer tasked with translating data into schemas and writing code just to make it intelligible to users again, I.T. will build better and more interoperable systems much faster because they and the user community will finally be speaking the same universal language of data.