Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) tends to be the motivating force for business revolutions when their leaders frame it as an ideal rather than an interface — as a set of policies for ensuring that transactions between partnered businesses maintain a prescribed format and workflow.

Through the 2000s, as Web engineers finally figured out how the Web was supposed to work, many of these same Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software vendors began offering their applications “as a service.” Some extended their marketing metaphors to include “in the cloud.” Thus began the trend of cloud confusion that we’re experiencing today.

For a quarter-century we’ve had the ingredients for a modern computing network at our disposal, and we merely disposed of them. But perhaps nowhere else in America are the truths of this particular scenario more pronounced, more clearly black-and-white, than in construction and building engineering.

If newcomers to the field of retail technology are to gain a foothold, they need a way to invent unique, competitive value, because there’s not enough incremental value for anyone to make a case. This is theoretically easier to accomplish if retailers themselves can be led to believe that their industry has already evolved into something unrecognizable, perhaps not even physical.

We have to stop relying upon catastrophes and massive failures to save us from the serious problems that face us.  When today’s power grid can’t handle the two-way traffic caused by wind farms and solar power any more, there might not be an asteroid crashing to Earth to save the day.

There is a growing class of digital marketing professionals who are becoming scientists, sociologists, students of human behavior. Instead of brute force, their tool of choice is business intelligence.

Maybe the customer is the true determinant of value in a business relationship, marketing now concedes.  If that’s so, maybe marketing should be the one providing the customer with the information and the positive brand image she needs to be able to choose the company as her supplier.  And in that role, marketing should be the one choosing the technology it implements.

See if this sounds familiar: As the sizes of databases grow linearly, the processing time expended in maintaining them grows exponentially. The relational model which governed the structure and processing of data since the 1960s, has been steadily failing.

The real technological issue of our time is tucked away in the background, in the grey area where right and wrong are not so black and white, and the fruit for juicy headlines doesn’t hang so low. It’s the unanswered question of the ownership of data. Put bluntly, to whom does data belong?

Governance frameworks have evolved to become the interfaces for businesses that share any kind of information with one another. In a world where cloud dynamics is taking effect, these interfaces become the skeletons for entire business models.