IBM Says Hub-and-Spoke Model Will Make Watson a Winner.. What about a Bottleneck?
October 4, 2019
Business Insider amuses me. It recycles IBM marketing material and slaps a paywall on collateral.
One possible example is the write up titled “The Head of IBM’s Watson Walks Us Through the Exact Model Tech Leaders Can Use to Build Excitement Around Any AI project.”
Not the word “exact.” Sounds like a winner. I like the “any AI project”, but I would wager a copy of the IBM PC 704 RAID documentation that if the AI project relied on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft technology, IBM might want to rethink that “any AI project” assurance.
DarkCyber noted this statement which is allegedly spontaneous, unedited, and prose worthy of Cicero, a wordsmith alive when the Romans were using the hub-and-spoke system to organize the Empire as the Barbarians destroyed what Rome built:
One way to ensure projects advance is to appoint leaders within each respective business unit to help support the chief technology, data, or innovation officers, argues IBM’s Rob Thomas, a system he refers to as the “hub-and-spoke” model because the structure resembles one in which a central point is connected to several secondary points. “You need somebody that has a seat at the table at the top that’s saying it’s important to the company,” he told Business Insider. Organizations also “need somebody in those business units that owns this day-to-day, but is accountable back to the company strategy.”
Now the hub-and-spoke analogy is different from the distributed information and computing model. The reason is visible when it snows in Chicago. Flights are delayed because the hub doesn’t work. Contrast that the architecture used by some of the Eastern European pirate streaming video sites.
A node dies and an origin server communicates with a control server to bring the node back up. What is an origin server is taken down? The smart software activates a hot spare origin server and the system comes back up. Magic? Nope, just side deals with some ISPs with interesting perceptions of right and wrong.
What will save IBM? The “thousands of O’Hare flights are cancelled approach” or the distributed system which cyber criminals have embraced enthusiastically.
The fact is that the hub-and-spoke model is unlikely to breathe much life into IBM. The top down approach is conceptually useful because it explains some of the issues arising from Industrial Revolution management: Blue suit, red tie, white shirt, etc.
Not only is the IBM solution unusual, it is not special content. What proof? Check out:
Microsoft’s 2009 encomium to SQLServer called “Using SQL Server to Build a Hub-and-Spoke Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture.”
New? Yeah, well. Convinced? Nope. One could combine Microsoft AI with SQLServer in a corporation. Will IBM support that?
Let’s ask Watson.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2019
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