Must Read..
By: sarb63
03 May 2006, 12:10 PM EDT
Msg. 43570 of 43573
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John Voeller
At the beginning of this conference I had the thought that we as humans get very fixated on a particular topic such as interoperability, which appears to be the most pressing problem or challenge of the time. But in so doing, often we lose sight of the bigger picture, i.e. there may be something we're missing that might help us if we just stopped to look at less obvious possibilities.
John Voeller, senior analyst at the White House, chief knowledge officer and chief technology officer at Black & Veatch, touched a nerve on that topic and others in his “Candid Examination of Technology's Readiness for Us and Us for it.”
Voeller started out commenting on China: OECD released their figures for world export at end of 2004 - at that time, China became the largest exporter of IT technology in the world. By end of 2005 they will be largest exporter of IT products in the world.
“We are seven years behind in doing what we already know how to do,” Voeller stated.
China is mounting the largest national effort to implant biometrics in everything in their society, in every facility they build. They are doing it with an eye to tagging everything. An area in an building will have knowledge, for example, a “contextual” understanding.
In 2003, the President's Council on Technology stated that China was 8th in technology. Perhaps more troubling is the fact that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has funded the building of a national repository for R&D in China.
Voeller listed 25 technologies that constriction should be monitoring and listed 2022 futurisms which included shape shifting metals, organic machining, self-organizing Omni networks, and DNA-based sensor families.
U.S. spending on R&D is not being spent on construction, charged Voeller. “There is a huge reservoir of knowledge hidden behind a series of walls. R&D communities have a lot to offer. You can access all the intelligence R&D going on in the U.S. The only difference is this information is not organized in a fashion that you can search.”
Many of the R&D that has been developed will have products available soon, and complement the work done in the construction industry. Voeller asked the audience to imagine IPv6 with packets that contained a DNA element. “We are moving to an intelligent device realm where human users will have tags.” We can also produce autonomous networks that can talk to each other. What if we make inanimate objects part of the decision making process? Voeller suggested.
One of the big reasons Chinese are mounting an effort in biometrics is they want to tag every good. The same freedom to copy others' intellectual property can cause them problems with their own intellectual property so they want to fix it quickly, according to Voeller.
Voeller clarified in a Q&A session with Foundyller that he didn't see the implications of his observations as a “menace.” Rather he saw them as the “next level of competitiveness.” “We're still not doing what we can do to provide the value to compete. The owners need to become more militant about what they're demanding. It will benefit us to step it up to compete on the world stage and at home.”
Our competitive advantage, as Voeller sees it, is that many of our best providers have done thousands of projects with the same people.
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