The Network Cheat Sheet
@PCPRO
FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO
So we can think of DARQ as a problem-solving mnemonic? It’s a nice thought, but that final letter complicates things. You might find a solution in blockchain technologies that you can start developing today, or discover a pre-rolled AI suite that’s close enough to your problem to be useful. You might even discover some productive trick with QR codes or AR goggles. But quantum computing is more aspirational and forwardlooking: right now its applications are limited, and few businesses will see much return from rushing to invest in the emergent technology. So ticking all the DARQ boxes could actually be a red flag? You’re right – just because an IT project control thoughtscape uses scoring to concretise your own assessments, that doesn’t mean the scores have any special value, or translate in any way to business benefits. “Perfect” technology scores can easily go hand-in-hand with a “nul points” rating from the people who have to use a system, or the shareholders.
DARQ How can the latest technologies contribute to your business? Steve Cassidy unpacks the acronym to find out I’ve been Googling for hours and I can’t find a single product that says it’s DARQ-compatible. Is this a real thing? Part of the problem is that DARQ shares its name with a fairly recent and quite popular video game, which gets in the way of any attempt at research. Moreover, the DARQ that we’re interested in isn’t itself a product or a company: it’s shorthand for a collection of four technologies, namely distributed ledger, artificial intelligence, extended reality and quantum computing (see the boxout “Don’t be left in the dark” below for a more detailed explanation of these terms). It’s not a coherent toolkit, or a necessary foundation of your projects. But if you can’t at least say something about DARQ then this might be an indication that your line-of-business apps are somewhat behind the times. So is this like the old Codd & Date stuff for relational databases? I see you’re not quite as green as you are cabbage-looking. For those who aren’t aware, Codd and Date were pioneers of the database in the 1960s; they proposed simple tests and questions that could help determine how “relational” your database was. DARQ can be similarly used as a yardstick or sanity check for your project planning, but it’s really a much broader, more high-level approach. With four immense concepts compressed into a single four-letter acronym, it’s not really amenable to simple box-ticking exercises. Is DARQ of any practical use to us at all, then? For sure: you simply need to compare your plans and systems to the broad spread of capabilities available across DARQ’s collected platforms. This should help you understand what you’re missing out on, and where your development and relationship time might be best spent. Your e-commerce system doubtless has a database in it of some type, but could it benefit from a blockchain-type model? Can you scale up a thousand times to accommodate a sudden flood of traffic just after an advert goes live, and then scale down again? What tools should you be using to achieve those desirable levels of stability and scalability? And so forth. 104
“If you can’t at least say something about DARQ then this might be an indication that your apps are behind the times”
Perhaps the value of DARQ is to remind us to be wary of hype. You might be onto something there. Thinking about DARQ certainly encourages more actual, well, thinking than relying on narrow web-page service stats or session counts. If DARQ hasn’t been on your radar, your team might welcome the new perspective. A good starting point is Accenture’s report on DARQ, which you can read at pcpro.link/ 335darq – in this case it’s much easier than relying on Google.
Don’t be left in the dark Distributed ledger technology basically means blockchain – probably not the specific one that underpins Bitcoin, but a custom chain that works in the same way. The idea is that truly collaborative manufacturing or project control works best when you maintain a secure, public record of who did what, and when. Artificial intelligence might be about trillions of simple little machines hunting for patterns in all that data you can’t throw away. Or it could be an expert system lurking in the background, taking in the big picture and watching for new opportunities, emerging trends or anything else. Each approach has its place.
Extended reality is a bit of a cheat, acronym-wise (I guess DAEQ isn’t so snappy), but never mind. It’s all about 3D goggles and similar technologies. In order to work with the amounts of data you’re likely to generate, you’ll need some slick visualisation tools, plus red-hot warehousing so your cyberworkers can pick and pack faster. Quantum computing is where the acronym shifts purpose. The other elements of DARQ can be deployed tomorrow, but with quantum we’re more at the stage of just keeping an eye on things, so you can determine when and whether specific workloads can be shunted onto a cloud-based service to gain that mythical million-fold speedup.
