Panel Four

Infrastructural Frameworks for Global Knowledge: "What can leaders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, with their wealth of orgnizational acumen and technical invention, do to help address these issues?"

Terri Griffith who heads the program director for innovation and organizational change, introduced the three speakers.

Howard Charney, Cisco Systems. He is talking about a major technology transformation and about how policy sets priority. The latest big transformation was the automobile industry which started in the late 18th century. He gives a rundown of the costs, growing pains. The auto infrastructure needed infrastructure in the form of the highway system.  He compares this to the Internet growth. He points out that there are many divides including the 'relevance divide' He thinks the growing pains are for an inevitable transformation.

Examples of enlightened policies include Jordan, eSlupsk, and eEthiopia.  He thinks the Jordan project is exemplary by building out infrastructure and to create content for schools in Arabic and English. There is also the development of Jordan's IT industry.

eSlupsk is outside of Warsaw, Poland. includes hot spots and 29 public institutions. All future projects in town have to fit in with this e-project.

eEthiopia will have health, agriculture, schools, and Woredanet to link 600 local and 11 regional govedrnment offices. 

the growing pains we can expect are not a bad thing.  the only one solution for divides comes from enlightened policy.

Jim Spohrer, Director of Research, IBM Almaden. Global Development and Service Infrastructure Growth.  What sort of development is going on, and what will contribute to sustained development?
He is head of services research at IBM and showed the top ten labor force (China has about 1/5 of the world's labor force) in the world and how many worked in different sectors including service.

The organizations that grow in a service sector help develop the human capital to escape from Amartya Sen's 'non-freedoms' .  He says there is a need for a new academic discipline in services sciences which are more difficult problems than technological ones.

John King, from Univ. of Michigan School of Information. The first person to talk about a library! In the library at Toledo most of the ancient Greek manuscripts and Arab writings were there. At the end of the 11th century, the library and staff were used and translated into Latin which contributed to the European Renaissance. The archbishop of Mainz drove all the printers from that German town because the printers were disruptive and spread all over Europe which spread the technology.

His own university is working with Google to convert about 5000 titles a week and will do the whole library eventually. He'd like to see what happens when several billion have access to the U. Mich collection, as opposed to the few million that might have access at present. He said we need to remember the function of these institutions (publishing/libraries) may run off the surplus wealth of a society and contribute to innovation and progress in culture.

Bowker: what is coming out that will have change things dramatically? What is on the horizon?
Charney: if the medium is not human, it's a perversion.  Going mobile is more human because you are not tethered. He sees a multi-use hand-held device that will do all sorts of things but at a higher fidelity. Part is wireless.

Comments

[Sylvia Caras]

I'd like a link to the Service Science Readling List that Jim Spohrer mentioned.

[Steve Cisler]

I'll ask the conference organizers if they can get that.

[Steve Cisler]

Here is Spohrer's reading list:
Chesbrough (2005) Towards a new science of services. Harvard Business Review.
Chesbrough (2004) A failing grade for the innovation academy. FinancialTimes.
Rust (2004) A call for a wider range of services research. J. of Service Research.
Tien & Berg (2003) A case for service systems engineering. J. Sys. Science & Sys. Eng.
Rouse (2004) Embracing the enterprise. Industrial Engineer.
Karmarkar (2004) Will you survive the services revolution. Harvard Business Review.
Vargo & Lusch (2004) Evolving a new dominant logic for marketing. J. of Marketing
Oliva & Sterman (2001) Quality erosion in the services industry. J. of Management Science.
Bryson et al (2005) Service worlds. Routledge. London, UK.
Herzenberg et al (1998) New rules for a new economy. Cornell University Press. Ithaca, NY.
McAfee (2005) Will web services really transform collaboration? MIT Sloan Management Review.
Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons (2001) Service management. McGraw-Hill. New York, NY.
Sampson (2001) Understanding service businesses. John Wiley: New York, NY.
Evolution and Change: Managed, Designed, and Emergent Khalil, Tarek (2000) Management of Technology. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
Nelson (2003) On the uneven evolution of human know-how. J. of Research Policy.
Agre (2004) An anthropological problem, a complex solution. J. of Human Organization.

[Steve Cisler]

Here are the unanswered questions submitted to the fourth panel at the April 21 conference:

We don't need sophisticated technology to read the contents of an old library. A digital library needs a huge infrastructure of technology just to read it. What kind of difference will that make regarding the longevity of good libraries? Will 'peak oil' make any difference?

If high tech companies believe that enlightened social policy will overcome the digital divide, does it follow that these same companies will be creating internal social and policy awareness department for competitive advantage?

Growing pains vs. growth of a (the?) divide. Yes we are in the early stages. Yes there will be much more diffusion (penetration) What is to prevent the considerable capabilities that have emerged from enabling abuses by the haves of the have nots? Egalitarian availability is not inevitable. Think about robber-barons and Detroit's destruction of mass transit.