Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Knowing, ahead of time, when to change the design of a technology system.

Consider:

We have software running on different computers. We don’t have much electrical power available for computers “out in the field,” i.e., they probably run on batteries. Hence, we move heavy computations to lab computers where electrical power is plentiful. This requires sending a relatively large amount of data from the field to the lab. The computers in the field don’t have much computational power when compared to the lab computers.

Technology Trigger: when a commercially available processor has X computational power at Y or less electrical power, we change how we assign which software to which computer, i.e., we can change the design of the system.

We have a design for today that works with the technology we have today. When technology changes, we change the design. If we are smart, and a bit lucky, we can set an explicit technology trigger so that we only have to monitor one or two things in the technology press.

The concept of the technology trigger is simple. Times change, technology changes, and solutions change with them. Simplicity, however, is not often practiced.

What are the technology realities that drive your designs today? Understand how your design would change if the wished-for technology existed. Watch those technologies as wishes will one day come true.