The title is a bit of click bait, but I’m using it to call this out as a baseline challenge. It does not matter what you do, or how you think, or how much money will be spent – the technology underlying your solution will simply never achieve all you want.

Every board presentation, every solution option is impacted by this core challenge. 

Despite all the years, the decades that have gone by, whilst a technology reaches maturity, it also reaches the point that it can’t solve your next problem. Instead of that, a new technology comes along to plug the gap, and delivers the next level of capabilities.

Even with the rise of Gen AI (where things have never looked easier), it doesn’t change the hard stops that tech will hit. For decades technology has promised to solve everything, but continually doesn’t deliver. Just a couple of promises to illustrate this:

• The 1980’s had Expert Systems that would solve all real world problems
• Early 2000’s promised Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to deliver reusability with loosely coupled components

These concepts and technologies did advance computing and solutions, but they simply never got anywhere near solving the complex parts of problems we want to solve.

As an architect, you have to underpin your designs with the premise that each technology you use will reach its limit. If you do a root cause analysis on project failures, a key strand will be technology not delivering on all its capability. There will also, sadly, be many examples a technology actually breaking your solution.