Boundaries, Social Capital and Cyberinfrastructure
Vince KellenCIO, University of Kentucky
[email protected] 21, 2010
CI Days, 2010
Growth in business computer assets
Index of computer assets held by industry
U.S. economy 1990-2007
31X increase in 17 years
Brynjolfsson, E. & Saunders, A. (2010). Wired for Innovation. How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy. MIT
CI Days, 2010
Internet and web permeate engineering and science and of course, everyday life for everyday people
By the end of 2010, 5 billion people will have cell phones (73% of the world’s population)
Wireless broadband, with about 600 million users today, will be nearing 1 billion in the next several years
New medical imaging (real time, 4D, fusion) will be requiring HPC for pre- and post- processing, superfast networking
Petascale computing is here with its requisite challenges
Exascale is being contemplated and will require very different approaches to power, memory subsystems, interconnects, programming, organizations, management, etc.
Progress, progress, progress…
Difficulties
Fragmentation
Architectural inertia
Data integration
Old boundaries
Economic development
CI Days, 2010
Growth in connectivity may increase fragmentation. Neighbors don’t read the same things. Fractionation of knowledge makes integration across domains harder, increasing fragmentation
Systems, built in haste, can be difficult to integrate. Old software doesn’t easily port to new environments, creating inertia
Data are being defined separately by each discipline making raw data reuse difficult
Sociological barriers and cultural boundaries can frustrate technology adoption and scientific collaboration
Building geographical clusters of research, industry, government and banking/investment is very difficult and time consuming and has its own ‘network effect’
Difficulties
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Research is an IT intensive, competitive market• Organizational capital investments magnify IT investments• IT can lower barriers of entry (Moore’s law?)• But as time goes by, the environment becomes
inhospitable to smaller players• Competition in IT intensive sectors is costly
What may be going on• Over-optimism (we can do this)• Limited planning foresight (future, neighbors, competitors)• Organizational factors that inhibit good use of the
investment
IT investments behave differently
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Organizational capital and IT assets
Brynjolfsson, E., Hitt, L., & Yang, S. (2002). Intangible Assets: Computers and Organizational Capital. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activities, 137- 198.
What is OC?OC = how orgs do work
E.g., investments in training, process improvements, best practices, federated decision-making, TQM, etc.
Findings:Organizations with both high investments in IT assets and organizational capital garnered a disproportionate share of market value from investors.
Leaders do MUCH better than laggards.
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Ever endemic, silos can prevent building large-scale architectures
Creativity is deeply personal. Tools and thought intertwine in the mind of the designer. Investigators and leaders naturally want to be in control of their designs and hence their tools
Old leadership paradigm: hire very smart people and give them what they need
Incentive systems typically reward individual versus group contribution
Organizations persist because the people within them are bound to some common concepts, terms and shared history. It is human nature to defend this organizational inheritance
Why do silos persist?
CI Days, 2010
A cultural shift that values building transformative relationships between people and organizations. This is somewhat less developed in academia than in industry
Investment in people and organizations that can span the boundaries of business, academics and government
Ontological engineering, more controlled vocabularies, constructing maps that relate different taxonomies to each other
Well-orchestrated local, regional and national planning
Innovations in management. Use and development of incentives to promote continued teamwork and collaboration
Transparency so all parties can jointly understand and plan
Things we will need to address these challenges
CI Days, 2010
With the economic and budgetary challenges ahead, we will need some big ideas to build support around and advance
Just as increasing scale in hardware requires eliminating all algorithmic and process inefficiency, we will need to reduce similar organizational kinks to afford the future
To effectively prioritize we will need more relationship capital
The size and scale of future cyberinfrastructure will require collective resources. No one will be able to go it alone
Kentucky has some unique advantages of geography and government/education/industry relationships. This should be a critical ingredient for success
Going forward
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