I was reading an article from CNET last week about the web.  The title was “It was 20 years ago today:  the web“.  The crux of the article was to discuss the impact of that famous research report authored by Tim Berners-Lee called “Information Management:  A proposal”.

What amazes me is how far we have come…

Today the web is everywhere.  It has made the world flat – something that ancient civilizations believed, but something now being delivered electronically through the ether.  Combine that with the improvements in telecommunications and we have a world in which data is king.

It is the lifeblood of every organization and is pumped across networks, through supply chains and between organizations.  Data rules, it is all-powering, it is the currency of the 21st century, and it is the web that has released it to grow to it’s full potential.

Today we all use email – but increasingly more and more of us are using social computing platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  Yet these wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for the web, and our infatuation with data.  Cloud computing has risen on the back of frustrations with the delivery of enterprise IT – made possible by the web, but requiring control of the data.  It is all too easy to absolve responsibility over the infrastructure of your IT delivery and to let others manage the backup of your data, but you must never ever absolve the responsibility of owning your data.

You see, while the web has freed us to explore exciting new ways of interacting between ourselves – both personally and commercially – it has done nothing to control the data.  Across all these worlds we must all keep a focus on the data and ensure we can trust it and use it effectively.  Guess what … that’s what data integration is all about.

So I agree with the author of the article (Charles Cooper). I would have loved to have been with Berners-Lee and the other individuals involved in the development of the Web who were congregating at the particle physics lab to celebrate.  I can’t, but I’ll raise a virtual toast also.   Long live the web, long live the data, long live data integration!

I’d be interested in hearing your views on this …