Information Abstraction

Introduction

The biggest impact that technology will have on business is how technology will be used to break the rules of the old game, and to create a new value proposition to the client that is based on a radically different financial and operational model. The technology per se will have a minimal impact on business unless it is used to change the business model in order to radically reduce cost or enhance the service provided to the client. The organisations that have the attitude towards change and the know-how to manage its consequences will be the first to reap the benefits in a world where business reformation will become a necessity.

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Welcome to the era of electronic abundance

“Survival dictates that human beings develop an ethics and aesthetics that favour exploiting fully those recourses that exist in abundance and economizing on those items that are in short supply.”

- Taichi Sakaiya (Gilder, 2001).

Corporate strategy is always focused on the realities of the future, yet when strategic planning sessions get underway, the mindsets are still mired in the past. A fundamental break with the past is required, as the most important lessons we can learn in the next decade are those that will come from the future. You cannot use an old map to find new land.

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Nano – Quo vadis

Written by Pieter Geldenhuys and Manfred Paeper.

(An abstract of the soon to be published article ‚Strategic Implications of
Nanotechnology in South African Textile Manufacturing‛ in the South African Business Review)

Everything we see around us is made up of atoms – the elemental building blocks of matter. The major technological ages of humankind have been defined by what untold numbers of these atoms can do in the guise of macroscopic objects.

Nature has played the game at this level for billions of years, building stuff with atomic precision. ‚Nanomachines‛ of DNA and RNA – perfect down to the last atom – generate the very basis of life.

‚We make almost everything by tearing stuff apart‛. For example, to make cotton fabric, we harvest and gin the bolls, blend the fibres, draw and wind it into yarn for knitting or weaving into greige. Further processing ultimately renders finished cloth for making up.

But what if we could work ‘from the bottom up’ and construct material from atoms, the smallest building blocks of matter. The idea has been percolating since 1959, when Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, gave a speech titled ‚There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom‛ where he argued that ‚the principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of manoeuvring things atom by atom‛ (Feynman, 1960:7)

Less than fifty years ago, such promise was the domain of poetic whimsy, akin to Blake writing in Auguries of Innocence of ‚See[ing] the World in a Grain of Sand‛ (Blake, 1800:1)

Over the ensuing years, chemists and biologists have tried to unravel the mysteries of molecular structures from the ‘bottom up, while physicists and engineers devised ever smaller machines from the ‘top down’. Their confluence is providing an ‚epochal cross-fertilisation of knowledge ‌ and conceptual turbulence of world views‛ (Crandall, 1996:21). Atoms are incredibly small, measured in nanometres – billionths (10-9) of a metre. When IBM researchers in 1981 first saw individual atoms and molecules revealed by scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM), it ‚truly was like discovering a new world‛ (Gavaghan, 2000:619).

Until fairly recently it was a world that science could describe only in terms of average behaviour of a block of atoms or molecules and which could be manipulated only in bulk. In 1996, Gimzewski and colleagues succeeded in precisely positioning a single molecule. While other scientists had managed this earlier at temperatures close to absolute zero, the IBM team had done this at room temperature, an important step towards constructing a molecule with a specific function.

‚Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.‛ – Albert Einstein (Harrow, 2003b:1)

Nanotechnology thus concerns itself with the directed manipulation of matter at the nanoscale.

The uses for nanotech in the short term are primarily industrial and pragmatic (Keiper, 2000). This comprises the majority of the work considered in this paper. Such thoughts are in line with that of the technology adoption life cycle, (Moore, 1991) in that the ‚chasm‛ of the technology has yet to be breached. Thus the attributes important to ‚early adopters‛ are discussed in the context of new product innovation in manufacturing rather than esoteric notions that have yet to reach anything resembling fruition.

However, the further-out vision of where nanotechnology might ultimately take us cannot be forgotten in terms of long-term strategy.

Beyond the pragmatic

Eric Drexler was one such farsighted individual, thinking beyond Feynman’s ideas in molecular-scale technology to propose a machine termed an ‘assembler’. A very powerful principle is that if complex molecules are made with complementary surfaces, they will-self assemble to make complex structures (Lewis, 1989). To build complex structures one needs to have systematic molecular positioning to make reactions occur in very specific and complicated patterns (Drexler, 1981) The important addition is that instead of being specific, like an enzyme that can catalyse only one reaction, ‚we are talking about things that can do programmable positioning; something that is general purpose, flexible tool for construction‛ and ways of driving these reactions using external sources of energy. It appears that assemblers can ‚build anything that makes chemical sense, and at that point the main limits will be physical law‛ (Drexler, 1986:10)

While much exploratory engineering leading toward that long range goal is still required. (Rietman, 2001) the impact of nanotechnology is already being felt in virtually all spheres of life and will continue to become an ever larger object on the radar screen as humanity hurtles toward tomorrow.

Defining the internet

The traditional viewpoint of describing the Internet is fundamentally that the Internet is a utility. Just as electricity and water are described as utilities, the Internet is seen as the new utility. The implication of a utility is that an organisation cannot survive long without it.

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Information symmetry in the era of transparency

The era of transparency is built on the invisible future. The only problem is – the invisible future is already here. We’ve said goodbye to our telephone answering machines. Now say goodbye to CDs, DVDs and phones. And what next? Welcome to the edge of the transparent economy where companies will no longer be able to hide behind information asymmetry. The customer will have exactly the same pricing information about the product that the seller has. In a world where all products are becoming utilities or commodities, a new basis of competition will emerge where information symmetry is a given.

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A few trends that will shape our future

Corporate strategy is always focused on the realities of the future, yet when strategic planning sessions get underway, the mindsets are still mired in the past. A fundamental break with the past is required, as the most important lessons we can learn in the next decade are those that will come from the future. You cannot use an old map to find new land.

… Continue Reading

Converge: Beyond the technological paradigm

Contemporary thinking regarding the Internet is currently founded firmly in the client-server paradigm. The current-server paradigm can be defined as the reigning mindset where the World Wide Web and access to it via Internet Browsers, is seen as the mainstay of Internet applications. This mindset is based on the view that the information on the Internet can be accessed and leveraged by a human, sitting in front of a Personal Computer who can access and manipulate information on Internet connected servers that holds shared and protected information.

Both the terms ‚E-commerce‛ and ‚E-business‛ obtain a new meaning as soon as the paradigm regarding our thinking of the Internet undergoes a fundamental change. The next phase the Internet will enter is called the Ubiquitous Internet paradigm. This paradigm will enable a new viewpoint to be established, and will help in changing the limiting mindset which restricts the true potential of E-business and E-commerce. In order to provide context to this new paradigm, a number of new technologies, devices, networks, applications and implications will be introduced to describe the impact that this new paradigm will have.

The Internet as a utility

The traditional viewpoint of describing the Internet is fundamentally that the Internet is a utility. Just as electricity and water are described as utilities, the Internet is seen as the new utility. The concept of a utility as that an organization cannot survive long without it. How long would a bank, a hotel or university function without water or electricity? The length of time an organization can continue with its daily activities without these core services can be measured in hours, or minutes at best. The Internet is already seen in this light in various organizations, where normal business activities are severely hampered without access to the Internet.

This description of the Internet is correct, yet still founded in the client-server paradigm. A more comprehensive description is required in order to understand the real nature of the Pervasive computing paradigm.

The description of the Pervasive computing paradigm is quite simple, yet it is deemed important to take a slightly longer route to provide a broader understanding of the Pervasive computing paradigm and the impact it will have on organizations, business and society at large.

Internet connectivity everywhere

The longer route to understanding where the Internet is going starts with this command to you, the reader.

Stick your finger in the air. At your fingertip you will find waves that carry at least radio 100 radio stations and more than 60 television stations. (If you do not believe me, use a radio receiver and a TV satellite dish to verify my claims.) At your fingertip you will also find radio waves that you can use to access the Internet. This may be via GSM data channels, GPRS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Within a few seconds you can log onto any Internet server or website via your cellular phone or PDA with a press of a button.

The Internet will undergo a substantial alteration as optical technologies allow the transmission of many trillions of bits per second on each strand of the Internet’s fibre-optic backbone network. The core of the network will remain optical, and the edges will use a mix of access technologies, ranging from radio and infrared to optical fibre and the old twisted-pair copper telephone lines. By then, the Internet will have been extended, by means of an interplanetary Internet backbone, to operate in outer space.

This simply means that Internet connectivity will be available everywhere you are. You will be able to access the Internet in the middle of the ocean, or if you find yourself in the International Space Station. Your access to the net will then be directly via satellite, whereas your choice of access on land will be far larger.

The most common link to the Internet when you are in travelling across the country is the data line provided by your GSM network, and in some cases their GPRS service. In cities and towns you will find Wi-Fi hotspots (IEEE 802.11b) wireless Internet connectivity hubs. You will incidentally find these in airports and even in aircraft from 2003 onwards. The whole west coast of the USA will be covered before the decade ends. The cellular companies will find themselves in a new playing field as cellular devices become both GSM and WiFi enabled. This will truly changes the rules of wireless communication as more and more people will be able to automatically choose their type of Internet activity, purely based on price and performance criteria. Bluetooth and Ultra Wide Band technology will also play its role in making the Internet accessible wherever we are. This is the true nature behind the Ubiquitous Commerce paradigm, as we become more and more connected, linked to the Internet 24 hours day, 7 days a week, wherever we are. No longer does an Internet server have the sole ability to be always connected to the Internet, we as humans will be always connected with the devices we carry in our pockets.

Humans are no longer born in radio space; they are born in Internet space