Of Architecture and IT Innovation

I recently watched a miniseries dramatizing the events surrounding the building of a Gothic cathedral, so I was excited to see the subject featured on NOVA last night.

NOVA took viewers to several cathedrals in France, and explained how different architectural breakthroughs allowed builders to construct ever-higher structures. First, pointed arches helped redistribute stress, allowing arches to be built higher and wider. But it didn't completely solve the problem, so the flying buttress was invented to counteract the force of gravity even further. Still, these new walls were unlikely to hold stone roofs — so the ribbed vault was developed to distribute the weight of the ceilings to columns.

Without any of these innovations, cathedrals as we know them would not exist. Engineering is a touchy business and depends a lot on the interplay between different tactics. And by no means is every problem solved the same way. In fact, one cathedral — at Amiens, France — features an iron chain skeleton that was forged centuries after it was completed, to make up for mistakes in the original engineering. A precursor to today's steel-frame skyscrapers?

How different is information technology from engineering? Not much, right? Problems are sometimes solved on the fly, with bolt-on solutions that while not ideal, come to be established practices. And, no matter what the solution, there is some amount of dressing-up that is done so no one realizes the inelegance of the process by which that solution was developed. (Did you ever suspect that the majestic flying buttresses bore so much of the load of the cathedrals?)

You never know what innovations will drive sectors forward. Gothic techniques pushed the envelope on construction, to the point where the seemingly impossible became possible. Even after they were built, architectural critics of the time gave them the name "Gothic" because they felt that the biggest, most beautiful, light-filled buildings on the Continent were barbaric!

Looking back, we can see seemingly minor breakthroughs that today are huge topics, like cloud computing. Some were scoffed at the time, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's never say, "People will never need/want that." The tide of innovation can't be stopped.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio