Friday, October 22, 2004

Si fallor, sum. (from my Borland blog)

I have doubts how all the things I want to include in this post really do connect. But they fall in the realm of thoughts that line up near each other, within a conceptual arm’s length.

One of the connecting points for me is a technological/sociological contrast of today - “Did offshoring create collaboration, or did collaboration create offshoring?

Numerous articles have been written about how the plummeting cost of telecommunication has been a key enabler of staff offshoring. But cheap phone calls are only part of the trend.

Simultaneously, transistors are getting both bigger and more powerful, and smaller and faster. And these shifts in each dimension have wide sweeping implications for how our world will continue to change. Big transistors are being used to manage what amounts to digital power (insulated gate bipolar transistors) – the underlying innovation which is making hybrid automotives possible.

Small transistors, which can use light, are coming our way courtesy of the inventor of the LED. As described in a recent MIT Technology Review ,

“The light-emitting transistor will be the focus of a new lab at the University of Illinois, where the versatile device was recently invented. Researchers at the Hyper-Uniform Nanophotonic Technology Center will work on improving and exploiting the transistor, which can pump out both electrical and optical signals in response to an input and could make it possible to replace the electrical wires in circuit boards with much faster optical pathways.”

Wow. Maybe not in my next Dell laptop – but I am betting that we see impact on the collaborative capabilities of computing from these inventions in the future. Better use of power, and faster computing pathways, both potentially end up in everything from laptops to factories. When is enough, enough? How will we manage all the computation and collaboration thrown off by these advances, almost like a cultural form of heat? What will we do with it?

Let’s look at some innovation in the “how we manage”. Telecom players, and providers to telecom players, are simultaneously scrambling to keep TCP/IP-based communication from eroding their revenue streams, while trying to create ways to charge for the manner in which TCP/IP-based communications is eroding their revenue streams. Two players have introduced capabilities that combine traditional telephony, IP-based telephony, point-of-presence information and multi-device management software. They are Nortel with its virtual enterprise efforts (think routers and switches for people), and Siemens with its HiPath Openscape which similarly attempts to unite presence with communication routes. Of course, all compliments of the IT Industry’s best and brightest who have clawed their way out of the primordial communications swamp, through the ooze of H.323 to emerge onto somewhat solid ground of SIP. (Hey Borland engineers, how about a little SIP with my ALM?)

What about “what do we do with it”? Here are a couple initiatives which are making use of the collaborative world we are creating.

If the dark side of our advances is found in some forms of outsourcing, then certainly the bright side is found in programs like the Digital Vision Program at Stanford (in conjunction with the Reuters Foundation) led by Stuart Gannes. It is a nine-month fellowship course that brings together 15 experienced technologists and social entrepreneurs from around the globe for technologically interesting and socially valuable projects. Stuart is a guy with plenty of talents – that he chooses to apply them in this endeavor is a tribute both to his qualities as person intent on making a better world, and to the capabilities we are imbuing in the world with collaborative technologies.

Not so far reaching, but an interesting thread of the tale comes in the formation of the Avalanche Technology Corp., a for-profit Minnesota-based cooperative. Created by a group of Midwestern CIO’s (folks are so darn friendly and practical in the Midwest), the purpose is to share pools of non-competing software capabilities in order to manage in-house development costs and risks.

And also from the plains states comes another attempt to keep IT jobs in America – albeit in new locations, through “farm-shoring”. It can be difficult for businesses in the large metropolitan areas, where many IT organizations are, to keep staff costs competitive. High housing costs and long commutes are at least partial culprits. Fact of the matter is, life isn’t nearly so expensive in Bagley, WI or Jonesboro, KS – unfortunately there are few relatively high paid jobs there. Kathy Brittain White, former CIO of Cardinal Health, is out to change that with her new company Rural Sourcing Inc., which has set up two development centers in rural Arkansas. Maybe this is a way to keep the kids close to the farm? If this catches on, it sure beats the heck out of fighting for the remaining jobs at the leather tannery in Sheboygan. It could also keep families and communities intact that have been under assault by our shift away from rural manufacturing centers over the last decades.

(Mom, clean my room, I’m coming back to Oklahoma!)

In any event, these ideas live for me in close conceptual proximity, and thanks to RSS, the blogosphere, and search engines they will at least briefly live on in text proximity search. No doubt.

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