While I also consider the possibility of cost savings associated with Cloud Computing important, I believe other implications are more important in the long-term. I discuss a second one today, and will touch on two more in the next few blog entries.

When we start thinking about moving applications to the cloud it leads us to reconsider how we develop applications. This change in thinking has, as a foundation, the move to object oriented design, and has been encouraged by  a change in conceptual ownership. I talk about both of these in this post.

OBJECT ORIENTED DESIGN. First, I want to emphasize that I am far from an expert in software development, let alone object development, and all of the implications. As usual, however, this does not stop me from having opinions.

When I was a beginning programmer, when I actually had jobs that resulted in results as opposed to my current responsibilities to produce insubstantial policies and hard to measure roles as a manager or heaven forbid, a leader, computer programs were written functionally. That is if you were writing a payroll program you would consider the steps one took to do the payroll:

• Hire a person
• Enter the time for the week
• Process the payroll

And so forth.

In more recent years, the focus changed to objects. That is when designing that same payroll program you might start with what were the ‘objects’ that would be involved in the system:

• A person
• The personnel record
• The check

Where an object could be a ‘thing’ or a process. You would then work through what information that object might expose and/or what actions the object might do or have done to it.

Cloud Computing lends itself well to the concept of object oriented implementations. It is likely to be difficult to think through how to do something functionally in a cloud, e.g. how do you divide up the function between your desktop computer and the work being done remotely over the Internet. But it is not so difficult to think through putting some objects in one location and some objects in the other. While you are still left with the issue of how to find (“discover”) an object and how to get them to ‘talk’ that is send messages to each other, these are solvable problems.

While I am sure I am over simplifying the concept, the way I look at it this is the basis for what has now become Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

If you consider the object as a service, that is, it provides a service to someone (or something), then SOA allows us to take a coherent approach to putting objects in the cloud and provides a discipline regarding how they interface.

OWNERSHIP. As important as how one develops software applications is the change in how organizations and developers look at the ownership of the result.

When something is developed in-house and implemented on the organization’s own computers in their own datacenter, there is a tendency to look inward for everything associated with the application. One is less likely to think about using external resources to optimize any of these activities.

However, when the application ends up partially or completely housed in a cloud, whether private or public, then the orientation for planning inevitably starts to focus on how to optimize the situation using at least some resources that are not under internal control. That is, it forces developers to think about the external provisioning.

Once one starts down that path, many additional options start to be under consideration.

What about using someone else’s services/objects to supplement my development? What would I have to do when designing and implementing my application to take advantage of such external resources?

Internet/cloud based providers have incentives to make this kind of interaction easier since this enhances their value-add. Mash-ups, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid), which can enable very creative solutions with significantly less development investment have become increasingly commonplace.

In summary, the second value-add of the movement to cloud is the change in approach to architecture of and implementation of applications.

I talk about and eventually will write about the movement from Ptolomaic, earth centered, to Copernican, sun centered, to Warholian, nothing centered, thought processes. This is the movement we are undergoing in application development, hastened by the move to the cloud.

What we design for today is not what will exist even two to three years in the future. The impact is only starting to be understood.

In the Pentagon that joke morphed. Whenever someone wanted to get additional budget, the reason was to ‘Deal With China’. Well, in fact, maybe that is still true.

In technology today, the current budget justification phrase is ‘Cloud Computing’. Except in this case, exactly what Cloud Computing is or what it can do is even less clear than normal. On the other hand, that lack of clarity means there are lots and lots of meetings, seminars, and conferences that deal with trying to define Cloud Computing and provide advice on what to do about it.

In that context, I was on a panel Monday, May 3, that discussed Cloud Computing and the kinds of new skills that would be needed to support Cloud initiatives, http://events.1105govinfo.com/Events/Cloud-Computing-Summit-2010/Sessions/Monday/CC4.aspx.

I had three major themes.

My first theme was that people tended to mean one of a number of radically different concepts under the general topic of Cloud Computing.

Many actually were talking about consolidating multiple applications on a fewer number of servers – virtualization. It was this step that accomplished much of the savings, if there were to be any, from Cloud Computing. In fact, it was certainly possible to do server consolidation and application virtualization without actually implementing anything that actually was ‘in the Cloud’.

Others used the term Cloud Computing to putting applications on the Internet; in the web. This approach is also often described as Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. I am probably not capturing all of the nuances of SOA but to me this basically means taking a program which traditionally was self-contained and isolated and treating it like a service which others could access or integrate into a larger set of combined services. Doing so efficiently requires writing programs a bit differently, adding the ability for a service to be discovered, that is found by others, and adding the capability to expose aspects of the service to others.

SOA in the end requires not just technology change but also cultural change. To be most effective it requires an organization to be much more collegial and standards based in how it designs and develops software.

Finally, some people meant having applications, or aspects of an application such as the platform it runs on, provided externally; that is, through a cloud. The big challenge here is that when using only internal resources it is possible, though in my opinion unwise, to get by without taking the time or applying the necessary rigor to develop service level agreements (SLA’s) for all of the aspects of your system.

You can tell if people are working hard by peering over their shoulders. You can measure performance by users calling and yelling at you, and dynamically reallocate resources by yelling at someone down the hall.

However, when you move a resource out of your internal operation it becomes absolutely critical to develop robust SLA’s to manage your provider’s performance and define your expectations. It turns out that this is very hard to do especially in areas that historically have not been defined in very precise terms such as security or privacy. This is, again in my opinion, one of the major underlying reasons why there is such resistance to moving applications to the cloud.

My second theme is derived from that last point. It was always useful to create business architecture’s to drive technology development. While it might be inefficient, it was historically possible when everything was accomplish internally to ignore that benefit and instead do what was in effect the opposite approach, develop technology solutions that ended up impacting the business.

However if an organization wants to move to the not-well-defined cloud, it becomes necessary to define the business architecture’s and business goals associated with the applications. Without that definition, the likelihood of achieving the promised benefits associated with Cloud Computing are highly unlikely to be achieved.

My third theme was that the major human capital impacts were:

• Technical and operational IT assets were likely over time to move to external service providers and away from user organizations
• The demands on procurement and legal professionals were going to change as their responsibilities became more and more ‘horizontal’ between organizations and their providers of service and less ‘vertical’ supporting internal hierarchical organizations
• The importance of technical staff who also were comfortable with business issues would dramatically increase.

Federal Computer Week, http://fcw.com/Articles/2010/05/04/cloud-computing-implications.aspx, covered the panel.

I was on January 15^th, you can listen to the entire show that week at http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007.

In this post, I wanted to briefly touch on the second of the two articles I discussed, DISA expands access to ProjectForge cloud environment, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/01/13/disa-projectforge-collaboration.aspx.

The article illustrates the greater comfort level that Government has with using open-source software produced by non-Governmental organizations. While not explicitly mentioned, this increased involvement is leading to open-source development going the other direction; being produced by Government and then placed into the greater community.

Just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, I should explain a few terms.

DISA, which stands for Defense Information Systems Agency, provides an increasingly large part of the Information Technology infrastructure for the Department of Defense; http://www.disa.mil/.

As I have mentioned in a number of venues before, I believe there needs to be a Civilian version of DISA to serve a similar purpose. The most logical candidate to me for this is GSA, though historically GSA has done a better job of managing contracts than managing the implementation of contracts. Regardless, as the Government increasingly understands the value of centralizing the provisioning of infrastructure, allowing the Program staff to focus on their program mission, DISA has increased its responsibilities; not without growing pains but that is a different blog entry.

The article talks about DISA expanding its ProjectForge effort associated with Cloud Computing, this effort is part of its forge.mil program. The word ‘forge’ comes from the original efforts to develop Open-source software.

Open-source software typically is created by crowd sourcing, which is with the participation of many contributors often in a fairly loosely coupled fashion. The process and the resulting source code is presented transparently. Companies typically make money around open-source efforts by selling training, consulting, and/or support contracts of one sort or another.  For more details, see http://opensource.org/.

There has been a continuing argument within Government over the proper place for open-source software. Some people are uncomfortable with the thought that the software has no single creator or owner.  Open-source advocates would argue that the gains achieved by making the source code completely visible are significant. Security experts tell me that security that is premised largely on secrecy ultimately fails. In the same way, the power of exposure, at least in theory, reduces the possibility of bugs and/or trapdoors which cause security vulnerabilities in a software application.

Fundamentally this discussion represents the much broader issue of the real-world value or power of crowd sourcing versus classical hierarchically produced results. I plan to talk more about this in later blog entries a bit more.

Returning to the article I presented, it is clear that the argument over Government use of open-source is being largely decided in favor of use. Here we have one of the largest providers of IT in the Federal Government with an active open-source effort both in concept and execution within the Federal Government.

The article also illustrates one of the under-reported stories; that of Government produced open-source software. It is increasingly common that the Government makes use of privately produced open-source software. But there are an increasing number of situations where the Government is creating open-source software and either making it available to a larger community for usage or even setting up relationships with non-Governmental organizations to manage the resulting open-source community.

Naturally I had more than two cents worth of thoughts about the issue and most likely my take was so orthogonal to what they were working on that it ended up being of marginal utility.

On the other hand, it gave me an excuse to think about the topic and allowed me to fill out another blog post. With Wyatt’s permission, the rest of the entry is what I sent to him in response to his request.

Thoughts On 2010 Technologies That Will Be Important to the Government, Pick 3-5

This is a pretty interesting question to answer.

Digital technologies are becoming integrated so tightly into almost everything that we do. Thus one’s answer depends to some extent as to who we are trying to answer for: the internal technologists, the operations managers, the CIO, or the people responsible for mission implementation.

In addition we are in a period of increasingly rapid and radical changes. Thus not only do we need to make a judgment about what technology might ‘win’, e.g. your thought of 4G Wireless winning out over WiMax, but also the impact of the technology; who could have predicted Apps for Democracy happening as a result of the increased capability and comfort level with 2.0 technologies.

Let me focus on those that will have the potential to cause dramatic change either in how Government relates to its external or internal stakeholders or manages itself. I will suggest four that I would pay attention to in 2010:

• Government 2.0
• Virtualization
• Real-time Security Situation Awareness
• Mobile Network Endpoints

 and one that I would start to pay attention to in 2010 but is just starting to reshape our approach to network and business architectures:

• Sensors.

The first two represent technologies whose 2010 importance are that they are moving from the edge of the art, or at least not as used by senior management, to mainstream.

Government 2.0 Where 2009 was a year where 2.0 technologies started to become used in general and where President Obama’s team pushing their use could be news, 2010 will be a year where every Government agency will be expected to have a robust 2.0 presence just to get to average. The culture changes needed to allow the exposure of increasing amounts of information, even in intermediate form, will take energy to overcome. But the result is extremely powerful allowing external interested parties to create mashups and produce much more interesting and often more user-friendly versions of the data which the Government might never have achieved.

This will also lead to greater use of 2.0 technologies to implement various versions of crowd sourcing. Where Intellipedia and Aspace are big news, internal wiki’s will become more second-nature. Pilots associated with prediction markets, using groups to predict things like project results or other public facing data, are starting to be piloted by early adopters.

Virtualization. In this case I am referring to virtualization computing resources, not virtual environments which I mention later. It is the maturing of virtualization of servers, still utilized by too few agencies, that has allowed the frenzy around cloud computing, with a dash of high-speed networking and ability to manage multi-tenancy on the servers also required.; though there is likely to be as much or more work done with private or community clouds than public usage in 2010.

This is a big tool for the going Green supporters as well.

Combine this with desktop virtualization and you start to get the incredibly big fight going on between desktop-client versus remote-client providers; the short-hand would be Microsoft vs Google. The implications are enormous in terms of technical architecture, application development, procurement, and security.

Real-time Security Situation Awareness. And speaking of security, I believe the big trend in 2010 will be away from static analysis focused on perimeter protection toward situational awareness used to enable mobile and distributed applications to run even while under attack.

This change underlies a lot of the ferment going on with how to rework the FISMA process.  It also ties back to the thought that it is increasingly necessary to prioritize security investments based on risk rather than trying to do everything everywhere; and thus nothing anywhere; moving from whack-a-mole security to a risk-based focus emphasizing availability and resiliency first.

For those interesting in a practical example, I would recommend looking at what the Department of State is doing in this space, which draws upon the Consensus Audit Guidelines (CAG) effort put together by John Gilligan and Alan Paller, which I had the honor of participating in.

Increasing Power of Mobile Network Endpoints. Cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) continue to proliferate as their computing and communications capabilities increase and their interface to the Internet becomes increasingly robust and integrated.

Here also, three big arguments are being played out:

.   the previously mentioned desktop-client versus remote-client

.  commercialization versus standardization

.  data sharing versus data privacy

Each of these are being dealt with inconsistently across the Federal Government. Their resolution will result in winners and losers organizationally and commercially.

Sensors. While I don’t believe most Government agencies will necessary pay attention to this topic, in fact their increasing power and distribution may overwhelm all of the other suggestions. They bring about two broad changes when they become ubiquitous:

.  they become participants in the network – creating an Internet of Things

.  they allow the collection of real-time data which can then be processed in real-time

This latter change allows virtual environments to become increasingly comingled with physical environments, here virtual refers to environments as Second Life.  Smart cities which interact with their citizens, like San Francisco where it is possible in some places to find out the location of empty parking spaces on your cell phone as you drive around; or the NYU/Cornell experiment wiring some of the NYC rivers so you can check on status from the web including from your cell phone. Applications like layar which provides information about where you are based on web-provisioned information will in the future pick-up its information from the physical surroundings as everything becomes an IP address and/or twitter participant.

Secure SCADA – Dec 2009 a

The presentation consists of two parts.

Part I was prepared by me and talks about the economic basis associated with the impact of the Internet, wanders through a number of topics I like to kick around (‘from earth centered to sun centered to nothing centered and what that means for Enterprise Architecture’, my thought that everything is a cloud, …), and touches on what the Government is thinking about regarding security.

Part II is a subset of what Rus Records, a fellow CSC’er, prepared which provided some thoughts on the state of SCADA systems in the Chemical, Energy, and Natural Resources areas (what CSC refers to as CENR).

I hope to expand on a number of these topics in future blog entries.

I, and the other authors that contributed similar articles making predictions and/or providing some thoughts about the then upcoming Obama Administration, are in the process of writing brief updates based on how the first year has gone.

The second generation of Web access will change the way government delivers services and its relationship with the American public.

by Daniel Mintz

In spring 2006, after becoming chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), I created a one-page, bulleted list of priorities and presented it in many forums inside and outside of the department. Various DOT stakeholders gave me feedback on these priorities, which I used for, among other things,modifying the list itself.

The original version of my fifth bullet (added in 2007), Government 2.0, said:“Exchange information in a consistent format and easy-to-access manner with key external and internal stakeholders, in particular the American public.” During one of my presentations, a senior official said they really liked the priority list, but could I change the beginning of the Government 2.0 bullet to “Exchange accurate information …”My response was that I was open to suggestions, but that the resulting bullet would be a lie.That is, the entire nature of the value of Government 2.0, in some sense, contradicts concerns over predictability, consistency, and accuracy for which we normally strive. In fact, the implications of Government 2.0—or, as it is sometimes called,Web 2.0— are more profound, and it will inevitably influence government, whether we plan for it or not.

The problems with my initial version of Government 2.0 were much broader than just the decision to insert or not insert the word “accurate.”Government 2.0 represents a better and more robust way of achieving timely and creative interaction with our stakeholders, in particular the American public. The federal government is using it more every day. The implementation of Government 2.0 raises numerous policy questions that will need to be addressed to take full advantage of the available capabilities.

Challenges

At present,most government agencies—as they grapple with ways to take advantage of the capabilities of this next generation of Internet—focus on the immediate problems it poses: security, privacy, and policy implications.The next administration will face two much larger challenges—we hope with the vision, focus, and stamina needed to address them—first, how best to build a government organization that can tolerate failure, at least in small doses, and second, how to make a government agency or department organizationally agile. Answering the first challenge will be necessary to start to take advantage of Government 2.0 capabilities. Answering the second will be required to maximize that utilization.This article does not provide answers to the two challenges, which would take too long and is outside its scope, but it does explain why those challenges are relevant and important.

Web 2.0

All the current candidates for president are using Web 2.0 capabilities, which provide the foundation for Government 2.0 efforts, as an integral part of their campaigns— including Web pages for online communication, Facebook and MySpace pages for social networking, and YouTube to hold presidential debates—much of which would not have been imagined during the last presidential contest a mere four years ago.The person elected from this group is likely to expect the same or more from government. Certainly, citizens drawn into the process by such campaign events will expect the same or more. Government 2.0 is fact already—and potentially transformational if it becomes a priority for the next administration.

Government 2.0

Historically (before the Internet), finding an item, or even the existence of an item, that met a defined set of requirements took significant amounts of time and (potentially) money. Researching a topic required physical effort. In many cases, such research would be impractical under time or cost constraints.

The first generation of the Web had people or companies creating content that others could access. Although this capability was powerful and useful, the information provided on the Web was static and passive. Once placed on the Web, it remained unchanged—unless and until the original provider updated it.

Government 2.0 is derived from the more general term,Web 2.0,which represents a second generation of Web usage.This second generation access differs greatly in at least three ways: it is participatory, pervasive, and integrated:

• Participatory.The original passive Internet—where a provider placed information on a Web page and a user read it—has changed. Users make their own content and, in the case of artificial worlds, become part of the Internet experience directly.
• Pervasive. Internet access has grown beyond the computer on a desk—to cell phones, cars, and even kitchen appliances. Hotels and coffee shops— and a growing number of other public and private spaces almost anywhere—feature wireless access.
• Integrated. More and more “things” are being connected to the Internet, from security access devices transmitting their status, to home security systems, to data devices implanted in a highway sending signals on the status of the road.We are entering a world where everything is connected to everything else.

Wikipedia and More

The initial impacts are felt in a variety of ways. For example,Web content is not controlled now by the original creator, who, over time, has become less and less clear. One of the best known examples of this is Wikipedia, which has become the largest single collection of information in existence. A small staff is responsible for coordinating all Wikipedia activities, but almost all of the content is provided by users, and most of the editing is accomplished by a coterie of volunteers.

The federal government has a variety of wikis. For example, the director of national intelligence has created Intellipedia, which is being used to collect information across a variety of federal intelligence agencies.The State Department has created Diplopedia,which allows its employees to share information about topics and experiences around the world.

The value of such wikis is that they allow groups of people who otherwise would have only limited contact with each other to pool their knowledge in a single repository available to all within that community. It not only increases information sharing, but also a sense of collegiality and partnership that otherwise might never arise.

Web 2.0, more recently, has taken an additional step—moving to a participatory model. Virtual worlds, the three-dimensional (3D) Internet, provide the capability to create an artificial world containing representations of real people called avatars. People are able to traverse such worlds, interacting with other people and obtaining information interactively.

One of the leading commercial examples is Second Life,where people or organizations are able to create islands where avatars (people) can congregate for social or business reasons. Second Life has become an active community, where information and services are bought and sold, social relationships thrive, training is conducted, and communities of interest are created.

A variety of government agencies have already created content on their own islands within Second Life. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has a presence where it discusses issues about weather and other aspects of its mission.The State Department has an embassy where it recently sponsored a jazz festival for Second Life participants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses its Second Life presence to provide health-related information.

New Challenges

The federal government faces a number of challenges that private industry does not when working with these kinds of public-facing Internet activities. First is the problem noted above—the desire that all published information produced by a government agency be “accurate.” Normally,wikis will undergo a continuous editing process, which allows them to approach “accuracy” over time, but they do not always start that way.

The second is a related problem, that any material a federal employee publishes can be taken as establishing or implying the establishment of formal policy. As anyone who has had their name appear in the press or has had to testify before the Congress will tell you, even offhand remarks and e-mails can be used in unexpected ways. A wiki or encounter in a virtual world is an “e-mail writ large.” Third, when the creation and maintenance of these sites crosses organizational boundaries—including federal, state, and local governments, as well as private stakeholders—responsibilities for the level of accuracy can become complex and unclear.

One final challenge when using 3D Internet sites like Second Life (as with any externally hosted solution) is a government agency’s inability to control what is happening anywhere in that virtual world—let alone on their specific island. Sometimes, what goes on can be embarrassing.

The Larger Context

Government 2.0 is not an isolated phenomenon but the next step in a continuum the Internet is forcing on all organizations as it continues to have an increasingly disruptive impact.

Cost

Economists use the term“transaction”to indicate the cost of an activity. By “cost,” they mean the resources required, whether money or a person’s time, to achieve the transaction.Not only does an organization change its behavior depending on transaction costs, but its structure.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams discuss the findings of Ronald Coase, a British researcher, who looked at why corporations existed and grew large. The reason Coase gave was that the cost of performing a transaction inside a corporation tended to be less expensive for many activities than for a transaction outside for that same activity. Thus, corporations over time acquired the activities that could be done less expensively in that fashion.

Measuring Results

For many years, computer technology did not have an impact on these inside and outside costs. The focus of information technology (IT) organizations and the organizations they supported, therefore,was optimizing the use of the computer technology. Thus, organizations focused on cost reduction, computer consolidation, centralized purchasing to achieve economies of scale, and, more recently, the creation of shared services throughout or across organizations (e-government initiatives, for example). The next logical step for government is to start focusing on how to measure and maximize the resulting programs rather than looking at how well the infrastructure supports them.

However, the Internet has changed this situation for the reasons noted. Now, the cost of performing a transaction may not be more outside an organization. For many larger organizations, the cost may be lower for increasing numbers and kinds of transactions outside rather than inside.

This is already having a dramatic impact on private sector organizations. Companies are increasing the use of external Internet-connected resources, including private individuals, to provide advertising advice, technical input, and even research and development capabilities that once would have been provided internally or from well-established and long-term partners.

Companies that learn to be organizationally “agile”—that can make internal changes to move specific functions outside the company and can train or hire staff members who understand how to use these new and changing relationships—will have a much higher chance of survival and success. The companies that are not agile run the risk of being driven out of business because of high-cost structures or their inability to move quickly enough to respond to changes in the marketplace.

Human Capital Implications

The impact on personnel will be significant. Capabilities required to define the business and contractual relationships and manage partnerships differ greatly from those for managing a hierarchical relationship. This change will require retraining or hiring new personnel who have these skills and capabilities.

Senior management will support these changes to obtain greater visibility into their organization. Junior staff members can more immediately impact policies and interface with the senior staff. Middle management will be threatened by these changes because its historic importance was often based on control of information up and down the organization.

Government will not be immune. Its private-sector partners will participate to stay in business; they will want to interface with the government in the same fashion. Young employees of the government will regard these capabilities as second nature; they will expect comparable capabilities in government—or they will look elsewhere for work.

Leadership Needed

We thus return to our initial challenges. Government 2.0 is in its infancy. No one knows what will work and what will fail. By its varied nature, these new Internet- enabled technologies allow unpredictable interactions between unexpected stakeholders producing unplanned results, none of which offer comfort to the typical government agency. To participate, government agencies will need to define small pilot projects and give the staff flexibility to experiment. In our current “blame first, ask questions later” environment, it will take strong leadership for this to occur.

The short-term advances of Government 2.0 are dramatic.The use of Internet-based information sharing and social networking has increased the opportunity to optimize the use of IT. Decreasing the costs of business transactions becomes possible. However, the real impact is likely to be organizational in nature—turning inside out the classical approach to organization structures and business relationships.

The federal government has struggled to make progress on the current set of e-government initiatives. It is a tribute to the Office of Management and Budget and the agencies that believe in the programs that so much has been done. The political and cultural hurdles of Government 2.0 will be more difficult to overcome, impacting more people more significantly. To have the best,most responsive government,we must tackle these issues.

Conclusion

There is argument about the date that Radio 2.0 was invented. Most of the important inventions relating to Radio 2.0 occurred in the 1920s. In its initial years, Radio 2.0 was treated the same as Radio 1.0—broadcasting stories and entertainment, essentially unchanged— even with the addition of video to Radio 2.0.

Over time, everyone realized that Radio 2.0,or Television, was not radio with pictures, but something entirely different. Television had a different relationship to its viewers,with a different method of participation and experience. None of that was obvious when it began. Similarly,what Government 2.0 will ultimately become and how it will affect government is only dimly understood today. It is likely to have a major impact on how government services are delivered, how government is organized, and ultimately how it relates to and with the American public.

Government 2.0 is a fact, not fiction. It will have an increasing presence in the next administration and will affect us all in ways barely imagined today.

References

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio: December 28, 2006).

 Before I get to the topic of this blog entry, sensors, I wanted to mention that I have been privileged to play a small role in the Government 2.0 Expo, www.gov2expo.com, occurring Tuesday, September 8^th, and the  Government 2.0 Summit, www.gov2summit.com, occurring Wednesday and Thursday, all at the DC Convention Center.

 The fact that so many people around the country are interested in experimenting with 2.0 technologies to improve the way Government interfaces to its external and internal stakeholders and in a fundamental fashion rethink how it should operate, is wonderful.

 Democracies only work well when there is vigorous debate and participation in the public square.  I encourage anyone who reads this blog, recently calculated in the ten’s of viewers, to access these web sites and get active in future such activities.

 Sensors

One of the ways to look at the development of Information Technology is the increased capabilities of fast computers, fast networks and fast sensors.

It is my contention that much of what we consider the recent revolution in social networking and the increasing impacts on organizations is a result of the maturing of the first two: fast computers and fast networks.

In particular, the impact of having broadband capabilities at the end-points of the network was the tipping point for this revolution. The term broadband refers to the ability to transmit a ‘broad’ range of frequencies of communications at once. The net impact is that the transmission speeds possible goes up a great deal when broadband communication is used.

Broadband allows high-speed uploads and more importantly downloads from the Internet, including streaming audio or video. End-points of the network, which started out as desktop computers and moved to laptop computers, now includes personal digital assistants, PDA’s, and cell phones in general.

When we have ubiquitous, fast, intelligent sensors distributed throughout a network, there are two very interesting developments that occur.

First, the way a sensor participates in an architecture changes. Historically sensors were passive participants in an implementation. One sent instructions to the sensor indicating what to measure or what to do. The sensor sent back information that it collected and/or information on what it was doing.

Now however, the sensor becomes an active agent. Using rules based approaches or some other more robust version of artificial intelligence, the sensor not only measures it also makes decisions and acts. To the extent that this has been true in a limited sense, we now start to approach behavior that starts to mimic Turing-quality; making it hard to distinguish whether there is a person reacting or a ‘non-person’ acting.

Listening to my in-laws talk to their GPS is only the tip of this particular iceberg.

Second, we are able to generate much more robust simulations; real-time simulations based on real-time data. When there is a serious car accident or a bridge collapses, we will be able to simulate the traffic implications and react to those simulations with data based not only on historical data but updated and enhanced by the real-time traffic data being collected after the event occurred.

So What Does This All Mean

I will talk about all of this in greater detail in future blog entries, but in this entry wanted to note one specific implication, the blurring of the division between real and artificial environments.

With sensors pulling in real-time data in real-time and the increasing ability to utilize this data in real-time, it will not be obvious as to whether we are touching the real-environment experiencing the real-data first hand or a virtual-environment experiencing the real-data virtually. In fact, it becomes less clear as to whether the division even makes sense anymore.

If we were in an office together, I would now slap my hand against my desk or on a table. I would note that in fact my hand is not ‘feeling’ the table, rather my brain is interpreting the sensations that are generated when my hand hits the table which is understood to be the same sensations one would feel if a hand were slapped on a table.

We can already experience in visual and auditory form and soon physically, it is possible to replicate all of that in a simulation. Perhaps a future generation of ‘Wi’ will allow us to physically touch that hula-hoop one can exercise with on the screen.

When a drone in Afghanistan is operated by a pilot based in the United States, what is the reality and what the virtual environment from the perspective of the pilot? How far are we from having a surgeon in St. Louis operate on a patient in New York?

When scientists have studied younger people, those generation Y digital natives; they have found that they look at themselves, news, information, and, in fact, reality differently than people who did not grow surrounded by the 7×24, always on, always available, easily editable Internet.

While these developments have changed all of our lives in many ways, the digital native’s relationship to all of their external environment is different in fundamental ways than, for example, mine who grew up with black and white TV’s and Peter Pan appearing once a year on TV (also, a topic for a later blog entry).

I would contend that the wide-distribution of sensors which will lead to the rapid development and integration of virtual environments, will cause the next generation of the next generation to look at reality even more radically differently with potentially dramatic social consequences.