In thinking about the waves of technology now washing over IT departments, I remembered something from a long-ago physics class. You may recall that when multiple waves, such as sound waves or ocean waves, converge upon one another, you can get either constructive or destructive interference, depending on the timing of their arrival, their angle of incidence and their relative strengths. With constructive interference, the waves combine and gain in amplitude, and with destructive interference, they tend to cancel each other out.

The question that this analogy raises is which sort of interference we will see with the waves currently rocking the IT world. We hope for constructive interference, with the whole greater than the sum of the parts, but how can we ensure that we end up with it?