ATR: The Speed of Business

Elsewhere in the tempus fugit world...

January 21, Associated Press – (International) Warming could open Arctic to data cable. Global warming has melted so much Arctic ice that a telecommunication group is moving forward with a project that was unthinkable just a few years ago: laying underwater fiber optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage. The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said the CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London. The quicker transmission time is important in the financial world where milliseconds can count in executing profitable trades and transactions. “Speed is the crux,” the CEO said. “You’re cutting the delay from 140 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds.” Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34980901/ns/us_news-environment/


Now I would tend to suggest that a cable from London to Tokyo via the Arctic would represent a monetary savings simply by being shorter and probably not having anything to do with pesky telecommunications companies in North America, but what do I know? The stated reason is to cut the delay from "140 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds". Not quite by half, but we're still talking milliseconds here. That's quite literally, less time than the blink of an eye. But this is where we're at. Business needs to reduce communications time to fewer milliseconds of latency. In one of my presentations, I talk about records managers often being Kodachrome in a digital camera world. The buzzword for today is velocity. Your decisions about records and the ability for an end user to make decisions about records, has to be the briefest instant. There's simply too much stuff and not enough time to spend the amount of time filing that once was the norm. When businesses are trying to shave milliseconds off of a transaction, we can't be asking users to scroll through hundreds of line items in a retention schedule.