Keynote I (Sunday, 5th)

Que Sera Sera: The Coincidental Confluence of Economics, Business, and Collaborative Computing

by

Dr. Michael L. Brodie
Sr. Technologist,
GTE Technology Organization

Abstract

"The World Wide Web (WWW) changes everything" but how? Amazon.com and eBay as exemplars of e-business do not begin to suggest what is possible. Technologists often think of technology change in technological terms. Technology serves to realize more significant changes such as the way business is conducted. More radical and more fundamental changes are those related to new economic models that underly, predict, and enable new business models and which define technology requirements. The potential offered by the next generation of technology will take at least a decade to understand and realize, since it involves fundamental change not only in computing models and practice but also in business and economics. Success requires overcoming major challenges such as distributed computing which simply does not exist in any scalable sense. Distributed object computing and applications, a wonderful idea, which if not superseded will manifest in a decade since it must scale up several orders of magnitude. The current industrial revolution will also lead to significant social and political change.

This is a time of radical change in what appears to be the parallel worlds of technology, business, and economics. They are not parallel. The intimate relationship of these domains has previously resulted in collateral homeostasis due in part to their interdependence. Current changes in these domains are leading to collateral change. This presentation focuses on the confluence of these changes. As technologists, we see technology and related business change daily. Economic change is less obvious but more radical. Current technology is designed to support 400-year-old economic models, which involve managing within organizational boundaries. It is inadequate to support new economic models, which involve going beyond those boundaries.

This presentation explores the next generation of computing based on the confluence of radical and coincidental changes in economics, business, and technology. Whereas technology is a key enabler of change, it is the servant, not the master. Without a depth of understanding of this enabling role and the context in which technology serves, technology can be misguided and its developers can lose perspective. This presentation outlines a proposal made to the US President's Office of Science and Technology for technology research for the next decade, which calls for new computational models and infrastructure to support the next generation of computing, collaborative computing. A major focus to reconsider the role of data in computing. This is only one view. Que sera, sera

Speaker Biography

Dr. Michael L. Brodie is Sr. Technologist, GTE Technology Organization, Waltham, MA and Chief Scientist (SAP Program) at GTE Corporation. He works on large-scale strategic Information Technology (IT) challenges for GTE Corporation's senior executives. His industrial and research focus is on large-scale information systems - their total life cycle, business and technical contexts, core technologies, and "integration" within in a large scale, operational telecommunications environment. Dr. Brodie has authored over 120 books, chapters, journal articles and conference papers. He has presented keynote talks, invited lectures and short courses on many topics in over twenty-five countries.