An enterprise is like a living body. Different departments become its organs and appendages. Some can live without the other, and some cannot. For this organic enterprise, IT is analogue of the brain. If you go in deeper, the brain is a cluster of neuron synapses that processes electronic signals not unlike a huge cluster of computers in a data center.
Consider the sheer volume of processing that's being done 24x7 in this neural data center! Unlike an IT data center, the brain cannot be shutdown for maintenance. There are no patches to security holes and no reboots to solve problems. If a 'network cable' is out in the brain, there is plenty to go haywire, but precious little you can do to fix it. Best of all, there is no 'OS' - or still, there is one, that is so powerful, that it is omnipresent.
What stores information about your friends and associates? Well, how exactly do you manage to "remember"? What part of your brain is the processor and where does the memory begin?
Mathematics, Biology, Endocrinology, Oncology, Mechanical and Kinetic Physics, Nutritional Science, languages and a zillion other capabilities come built-in with the brain. And the one thing that sets the humans apart from animals - the capability to analyze, innovate and invent. (basically dream...) The brain is a factor to the very hope of evolution of the species. A blue screen failure here(not uncommon in Windows) will certainly mean a black screen of death, or even a species-level extinction without a hope of recovery with a simple reboot.
Look also at the raw power of this neural data center. From the thousands(or millions) of sensor points in the body, signals reach the brain about different things. Some tell the brain to feel you feel pain, while others signal the need for nourishment. Still other indicate how far you have moved a single finger in response to a previous command. This is processed, compared, analyzed, stored and new commands issued instantaneously. So much of the functionality is autonomous, and so much is manual. And so much can go wrong.
Yet the human mind lives on for a hundred years. Yet, it fights through the adversities of weather, differences of water and food, lives through Tsunamis and wars and 9/11's. The boy's mind worked all the while from falling into the well to the time he was rescued 60 or so hours later, even though he was of so young an age. It finds the time and resources to imagine and dream. To comceptualize and visualize the abstract. To theorize about things it cannot even see or fathom - matters of Theology and Comsic Science. Its memory is impressive, with the ability to recall audio, video and even the tiniest bit of information like the fragrance your girl friend wore when you first met her, all at the merest brush of a hint of a thought about that event. Yet, Sergey Brin or Larry Page never got their hands on your brain.
When someone runs an enterprise, you sometimes see that they do not copy the giants out there to perfection, but infact copy the human body to some extent. And with it, they try to incorporate the power of the human brain into its IT. Things to help them on are already there. More and more software becoming crash resistant. (they still happen, but the frequency has waned). Long uptimes are the order of the day rather than being an exception. With the launch of multi-core processors, more applications and more powerful ones at that can run better on servers. Search has become even more resilient and placed itself firmly at the heart of everything from Internet browsing to managing knowledge warehouses. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, Dual Layer DVD's, WiMAX and Mobile WiMAX(802.11n), Serial SCSI, SOA, SaaS, Virtualization, Consolidation... the list is long of the things that are enabling that organic enterprise brain-like IT for us.
The only ability that the brain lacks is perhaps the ability to connect with other brains directly - a sort of neural hypernet. Some of this is overcome with the ability to speak and communicate visually or by writing it down. A computer can only send data to a computer of the future, and it must leave the interpretation of that data to the future computer. The Human Brain can express explicitly what it felt about that data. The cave paintings from history are a testimonial to that.
Imagine IT like that...
