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FEATURED TOPICDigital Transition -The term "Digital Transition" describes the process all organizations must go through in the 21st Century, as they leverage new technologies that provide new options for Applications, Equipment, Processes, and Networks that make them more effective. In contrast, the term "Municipal Wireless" is limiting. It puts the network technology ahead of the application and process changes that drive the business case. ORIENTATION |
The ABCs of Community Broadband is now available on Amazon!
The ABCs of Community Broadband is now available on Amazon.com - follow this link to get your copy. As an introductory offer, I'm making a discount available to MetroNetIQ readers who go to the MetroNetIQ e-store - click here and then use this discount code EHUBP9RB when you order and you'll receive a 20% discount off the $22.95 regular price! This is a limited time offer, so do it today! Posted on August 28, 2008 at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) The ABCs of Community Broadband
The new cover - I edited ALL weekend, but I'm glad I did. I finally received my first proof back from the publisher and had at it with red pen, slash and burn time - ha! and to think I thought I was almost through this process! Seriously, one more proof round, and I hope to have it ready for public release no later than mid-August (fingers firmly crossed). You'll be able to buy it through Amazon, of course, but I'd urge you also to keep an eye on the MetroNetIQ eStore, link posted on this site on the lower right column, just scroll down until you see it...it'll be a few bucks cheaper over there... See the excerpt available in this previous post... Posted on July 29, 2008 at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) Rest In Peace, Randy PauschA day or two behind, I'm listening this morning to yesterday's NPR Saturday Morning Edition radio show, where I just heard that Carnegie Mellon professor Dr. Randy Pausch has succumbed to the pancreatic cancer that overtook him, passing away on Friday, July 25. Dr. Pausch offered a wonderful gift to his kids, and to the world, in his Last Lecture, recorded for posterity and memorialized in a book, The Last Lecture, which is currently on the NYT Best Seller List for Hardcover Advice Books. I covered this topic in a post on January 12 of this year titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, which provides access to video clips. Do yourself a favor and spend a little time on this video. Buy the book and give some thought to what you are doing in your life and why you are doing it. Kiss and hug the ones you love. Thank You Most Sincerely and May God Bless You and Your Family, Randy Pausch. Posted on July 27, 2008 at 06:29 AM | Comments (0) From Space and Cold War to Broadband and Climate Change: Facing Challenges Requires CommitmentOn May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, just 4 months in office, addressed a joint session of Congress. After detailing several threatening developments in SE Asia and the march of communism around the world (here comes Vietnam!), Pres. Kennedy concluded his speech by issuing a challenge to Congress and the American People. So stirring was the response - today is the 39th anniversary of that famous walk on the moon's surface - that no doubt to the surprise of the many doubters, it worked! And it provided scientific momentum for decades. It's time to get busy again, it's time for bold leadership, again. This is what real leadership is like, challenging followers to a noble task related to a noteworthy vision, a task that will cause them pain but will make them more fully human, will lead them to a greater place. Here is the text of that speech, the money parts, near the end, quoted directly below. Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. Since early in my term, our efforts in space have been under review. With the advice of the Vice President, who is Chairman of the National Space Council, we have examined where we are strong and where we are not, where we may succeed and where we may not. Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment. Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last. We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world, but as shown by the feat of astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful. But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share. I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals: First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there. Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself. Third, an additional 50 million dollars will make the most of our present leadership, by accelerating the use of space satellites for world-wide communications. Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars--of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau--will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation. Let it be clear - and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make - let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs: 531 million dollars in fiscal '62 - an estimated seven to nine billion dollars additional over the next five years. If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all. Now this is a choice which this country must make, and I am confident that under the leadership of the Space Committees of the Congress, and the Appropriating Committees, that you will consider the matter carefully. It is a most important decision that we make as a nation. But all of you have lived through the last four years and have seen the significance of space and the adventures in space, and no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space. I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year. This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, material and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts. It means we cannot afford undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel. New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. They could in fact, aggravate them further--unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space. I've included a call for local Broadband Leadership that I made on this website 17 months ago, after the jump. Yesterday, I made a similar call for local leadership regarding climate change (see A Time to Be Bold). We need leadership to move our nation away from burning carbon fuels - talking about our compelling need as a a society to change the way we make electricity, highlighting Al Gore's recent speech echoing JFK's challenge to the nation with a new one - 100% carbon-free electricity in 10 years. The problem is carbon fuels, the challenge is real, the response awaits. Broadband Leadership? It Starts at Home This article was written and published on MetroNetIQ on Feb 10, 2007. I'm a little nostalgic tonight, as I sit here watching a DVD with my family - Apollo 13. I'm turning 50 this summer, so I was almost exactly my daughter's age (12 1/2) back in April 1970 when these events occurred. Seeing Act One of this movie, with all that good classic rock and roll in the soundtrack, and the launch scene of the Saturn V rocket, brought back memories of NASA's Gemini and Apollo programs, and I got nostalgic reminiscing about the "good old days" when our government actually charted out ambitious and visionary goals and we as a nation got behind them - and it all came together and it worked, albeit with adversity to work through. Sure, it worked, but it worked because we made it work, together. We managed to get to the moon eight years after Pres. Kennedy, facing the challenge from the Soviets, proclaimed his challenge to the nation to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and mobilized a nation on a truly historic path. It's still amazing. How fast we forget what we're capable of when we focus. It wasn't a walk in the park either. We overcame the disaster of a fire on the launch pad on Apollo 1 that tragically took the lives of three astronauts, then we moved on to the success of Apollo 11, and then the program encountered this disaster on the Apollo 13 mission. The NASA team pulled together and brought the boys home, and they did it with slide rules and no PCs (and no broadband, by the way). I know that Hollywood and director Ron Howard have a way of putting a nice shine on things, and that nearly 40-odd years of hindsight help me to put the Apollo effort in perspective, and to gloss over the difficult times. Still, it seems that we had something then that we have lost...life seems at once more complicated and less clear, and our challenges greater and more numerous today than they were back then. So what, you may ask, does this have to do with broadband, anyway? Well, it's a coincidence, I guess, that a few hours before this movie, I started reading several blogs and Internet postings about a recent essay promoting a national broadband policy. Here's the blog on Cook's Collaborative Edge that kicked off this whole train of thought. After reading and surfing around, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the way the government took a leadership role in the Space Race back then (President Kennedy's famous challenge), and the general fumbling and failure of our leadership today to develop a national broadband policy (President Bush's assuring vision statement). Back then, we understood we would all have to work together, today, we're told "Don't worry, I assure you we'll get there" and then, in predictable fashion, we don't get there. And they wonder about declining trust in politics and government leadership. So I'm struck by the difference between what we were able to do back in the 60s and 70s, with sheer will power, perseverance, and good old American can-do attitude, compared with what we are not doing today as a nation, as we watch countries like Japan, Korea, Sweden, and France, move ahead with strong national leadership and vison, as they implement a broadband strategy to create a national communications infrastructure that befits the 21st Century. Why is that? How come, I ask myself, broadband doesn't capture the imagination of people today the way that space exploration did back then? Well, for one, we've become pretty used to techological magic in the past 40 years. For another, we lack the leadership we had back then. No leadership focus, no national mobilization. Personally, I wore out on this whole discussion and took a voluntary hiatus from the national broadband debate sometime last summer, as I became more focused on my own activities here in Central Texas. But a recent essay by metropolitan broadband luminary Jim Baller has brought me back to this topic, and its time to weigh in. Jim's essay really demands some inspection and review, as Jim is one of a handful of true experts in this field, and his tireless efforts to promote progress deserve this attention. I respect him. So, Jim Baller wrote this essay on a National Broadband Strategy last month (January 2007), commenting on his article in the October 2006 issue of FiberPrism journal, where he and his partner opined on the need for a national broadband policy. In his recent essay, Jim takes a stab at a point-by-point program to get to such a policy. I recommend both of these articles. Doing a little more digging, I came up with this article cited in the essay: in Foreign Affairs magazine, Thomas Bleha comments on the need for a national broadband policy, back in Summer 2005. In a follow up article, Philip J. Weiser takes a slightly different tack and we have also the commentary from Bleha. All this talk about broadband policy in the US, amidst all this action abroad (see this link for a good update on OECD broadband activities, circa June 2006). I have to admit that I've become disenchanted with the long wait for national leadership in this area. In fact, I've structured a career that doesn't depend on national leadership - I'm putting my money on local leadership. I've met enough impressive local leaders that give me confidence. I still hope for national leadership that will mobilize the public on this issue and will focus resources to get our country moving, so that we will be competitive over time. But I have to say, we could all grow old waiting for the powers that be to get serious about wiring up our country with fiber optics to the "last mile." It was three years ago that President Bush, in his style, laid out a vision for Ubiquitous Broadband by 2007, and then his administration failed ot follow up on it. We had a couple of blogs on this topic on this site a full 18 months ago, here and here. So, its out of my control, and in Stephen Covey Seven Habits fashion, I suggest that we focus on what we can control in order to get results and make progress, and that, my friends, starts at the local level. Better, in my opinion, to get busy to get local projects underway, to start generating the lessons learned and all the little steps that need to be done to move a country forward, collectively, in this area. I trust that real leaders like Jim Baller and others will continue to work to motivate our national political leaders, and that a National Broadband Policy Task Force will someday get organized and busy on doing the necessary heavy lifting to get the full weight of the country's resources behind this effort. But as for me, I'll keep doing my little part to move things forward, by showing that we can do something today, and that something is to get individual cities wired up, with wireless and with wired broadband networks, and where possible, to get regions to collaborate. But part of me longs for the type of leadership and can-do spirit, the imagination and chutzpa we had a generation ago in this nation, the "right stuff" that would send men up in tin cans into space, and bring them back alive, just to show that we could. I feel better when I reflect on that - that same kind of spirit still resides in the hearts of local leaders that initiate and promote these municipal wireless projects and see them through. In our own way, here in the 21st Century, we are pushing out the envelope on technology in a myriad of ways, and forging new paths, if on a less dramatic stage than back then. And so it goes, as I approach 50. My own dreams, like those of our nation, are a little scaled down now, in this more complex world of the 21st Century, where I find myself as an adult. But I'm now a player in the game, rather than a spectator. After all, there is undeniable progress on the digital front. I watched this movie on a DVD on my flat screen TV, whereas I watched the Apollo moon landing on a tiny black and white screen as a budding teenager. I'm active in spreading broadband connectivity at the local level, and I'm blogging on a laptop in my living room, as I watch the movie. And .. oh yeah, as a postscript, the Apollo crew made it back down to earth, in one piece, thanks to the thousands of people on the earth that supported them. Our dreams may be more distributed today, more "down to earth," if you will, but we're still pushing out the frontiers. And the wireless networks we build are going up thanks to the thousands of people in this new industry who are helping to make it all happen. Posted on July 20, 2008 at 06:01 AM | Comments (0) A Time To Be Bold, Not to Do As You're Told39 years and 3 days ago ... the United States met a challenge laid out to it, indeed, they beat the 10-year challenge, putting two men on the moon and bringing them back alive, with nearly 2 years to spare. Oh, those were the days. Were we giants, or did we just have more spine? The irony struck me as I sat watching this video of the dramatic blastoff of the Saturn V rocket, with massive flames spewing out the bottom of the rocket. It was really the controlled explosion of a huge cannister of fuel, a mixture of liquid oxygen and rocket petroleum fuel. This may turn out to be the epitome of the use of carbon-based fuels, the most dramatic example of what we were able to do with fire and sequestered carbon-based fuels. Now it's representative of a grand success, meeting a bold challenge laid out to the nation. The challenge - to quit using carbon-based fuels to heat water to make steam to run turbines that power our electric grid. It's not as clean a story, but it's an important challenge. Al Gore made a surprise visit to my hometown today, to address a gathering of on-line progressives - that inspired me to track down the text of the speech he gave this week. I've read enough articles about it, but I hadn't had time to read the actual text. Thinking you might be in the same boat, I'm posting this link to the speech text, and I've copied it below, if you just want to read it here. If you want the bottom line, here it is. Al Gore observes that times are bad (no kidding!) and claims that all our solutions these days tend to be tepid and our problems are out of control, way out of control. It's time to be bold. And many of those problems tend to have a common element - an over-reliance on old approaches, even as they grow less and less effective, including a big reliance on carbon-based fuels. With great timing, Al Gore highlights the great opportunity we have with the upcoming change in national leadership and an international conference on climate change. He borrows from JFK by issuing a challenge to our nation - to go 100% renewable in our production of electricity in the US in 10 years, eliminating carbon from power plant fuels. It's not as sexy as putting a man on the moon, but it is a helluva challenge, and in fact, the stakes are far, far higher, notwithstanding the many benefits the space program gave our society. We're talking about turning our nation around, perhaps even about saving the planet! Many people deny it can be done, but isn't that the definition of a Bold Challenge? I've always thought that this great nation can do whatever it sets its mind to, and I think that goes double for our nation's communities. With all the technological advantages we have, we can do this too. But, there's that little thing about setting our mind to the task. This task will take an effort on the part of every community in America. The timid need not apply. It's a time to be bold. For too long we've said No to challenges, No to anything that lay beyond a six-month horizon, No to anything that had any political risk attached. Are we ready to start saying Yes to Hope and Change? Are we up to it? Is your community up to it? Here's the picture from 39 years ago tomorrow, on July 20, 1969, we had our own Columbus moment, sending human beings where human beings had never gone before, indeed, accomplishing a task and meeting an objective that never even in their wildest imaginations had they even dreamed that such a thing could be done. A Generational Challenge to Repower America This speech was given today (July 17, 2008) at the D.A.R. Constitutional Hall Ladies and gentlemen: There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more - if more should be required - the future of human civilization is at stake. I don't remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly. The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse - much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland's largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City. Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world. Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an "energy tsunami" that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse. And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn't it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today. Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that's been worrying me. I'm convinced that one reason we've seemed paralyzed in the face of these crises is our tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately -- without taking the others into account. And these outdated proposals have not only been ineffective - they almost always make the other crises even worse. Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges -- the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change. But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels. In my search for genuinely effective answers to the climate crisis, I have held a series of "solutions summits" with engineers, scientists, and CEOs. In those discussions, one thing has become abundantly clear: when you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices. Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war in the Persian Gulf. What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don't cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home? We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses. And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America. The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses. But to make this exciting potential a reality, and truly solve our nation's problems, we need a new start. That's why I'm proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It's not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America. Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans -- in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen. A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here's what's changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power - coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal -- have radically changed the economics of energy. When I first went to Congress 32 years ago, I listened to experts testify that if oil ever got to $35 a barrel, then renewable sources of energy would become competitive. Well, today, the price of oil is over $135 per barrel. And sure enough, billions of dollars of new investment are flowing into the development of concentrated solar thermal, photovoltaics, windmills, geothermal plants, and a variety of ingenious new ways to improve our efficiency and conserve presently wasted energy. And as the demand for renewable energy grows, the costs will continue to fall. Let me give you one revealing example: the price of the specialized silicon used to make solar cells was recently as high as $300 per kilogram. But the newest contracts have prices as low as $50 a kilogram. You know, the same thing happened with computer chips -- also made out of silicon. The price paid for the same performance came down by 50 percent every 18 months -- year after year, and that's what's happened for 40 years in a row. To those who argue that we do not yet have the technology to accomplish these results with renewable energy: I ask them to come with me to meet the entrepreneurs who will drive this revolution. I've seen what they are doing and I have no doubt that we can meet this challenge. To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to consider whether the costs of oil and coal will ever stop increasing if we keep relying on quickly depleting energy sources to feed a rapidly growing demand all around the world. When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down. When we send money to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day, they build new skyscrapers and we lose jobs. When we spend that money building solar arrays and windmills, we build competitive industries and gain jobs here at home. Of course there are those who will tell us this can't be done. Some of the voices we hear are the defenders of the status quo -- the ones with a vested interest in perpetuating the current system, no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay. But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the inevitability of its demise. As one OPEC oil minister observed, "The Stone Age didn't end because of a shortage of stones." To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider what the world's scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don't act in 10 years. The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis. When the use of oil and coal goes up, pollution goes up. When the use of solar, wind and geothermal increases, pollution comes down. To those who say the challenge is not politically viable: I suggest they go before the American people and try to defend the status quo. Then bear witness to the people's appetite for change. I for one do not believe our country can withstand 10 more years of the status quo. Our families cannot stand 10 more years of gas price increases. Our workers cannot stand 10 more years of job losses and outsourcing of factories. Our economy cannot stand 10 more years of sending $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries for oil. And our soldiers and their families cannot take another 10 years of repeated troop deployments to dangerous regions that just happen to have large oil supplies. What could we do instead for the next 10 years? What should we do during the next 10 years? Some of our greatest accomplishments as a nation have resulted from commitments to reach a goal that fell well beyond the next election: the Marshall Plan, Social Security, the interstate highway system. But a political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it's meaningless. Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target. When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. To be sure, reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years will require us to overcome many obstacles. At present, for example, we do not have a unified national grid that is sufficiently advanced to link the areas where the sun shines and the wind blows to the cities in the East and the West that need the electricity. Our national electric grid is critical infrastructure, as vital to the health and security of our economy as our highways and telecommunication networks. Today, our grids are antiquated, fragile, and vulnerable to cascading failure. Power outages and defects in the current grid system cost US businesses more than $120 billion dollars a year. It has to be upgraded anyway. We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid. At the same time, of course, we need to greatly improve our commitment to efficiency and conservation. That's the best investment we can make. America's transition to renewable energy sources must also include adequate provisions to assist those Americans who would unfairly face hardship. For example, we must recognize those who have toiled in dangerous conditions to bring us our present energy supply. We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry. Every single one of them. Of course, we could and should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make. In order to foster international cooperation, it is also essential that the United States rejoin the global community and lead efforts to secure an international treaty at Copenhagen in December of next year that includes a cap on CO2 emissions and a global partnership that recognizes the necessity of addressing the threats of extreme poverty and disease as part of the world's agenda for solving the climate crisis. Of course the greatest obstacle to meeting the challenge of 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years may be the deep dysfunction of our politics and our self-governing system as it exists today. In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness. It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now. Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they're going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people. If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term. However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline. Many Americans have begun to wonder whether or not we've simply lost our appetite for bold policy solutions. And folks who claim to know how our system works these days have told us we might as well forget about our political system doing anything bold, especially if it is contrary to the wishes of special interests. And I've got to admit, that sure seems to be the way things have been going. But I've begun to hear different voices in this country from people who are not only tired of baby steps and special interest politics, but are hungry for a new, different and bold approach. We are on the eve of a presidential election. We are in the midst of an international climate treaty process that will conclude its work before the end of the first year of the new president's term. It is a great error to say that the United States must wait for others to join us in this matter. In fact, we must move first, because that is the key to getting others to follow; and because moving first is in our own national interest. So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge -- for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. It's time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric. We need to act now. This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate. I'm asking you - each of you - to join me and build this future. Please join the WE campaign at wecansolveit.org. We need you. And we need you now. We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership. On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later. I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket's engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race. We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind. Posted on July 19, 2008 at 10:48 PM | Comments (0) A Broadband "Amuse Bouche"
Ever been to one of those fancy restaurants where the waiter brings out a little morsel - something that you didn't even order and that you don't have to pay for!!!??? It is intended to be a delightful surprise, and it generally is. If on the rare occasion it isn't, well then, what the hell, you didn't pay for it, after all! It's called an Amuse Bouche (ah-mooz boosh), which is French for "make the mouth happy." Here is a sample excerpt from my new book, my own little Amuse Bouche for you all my readers to start the weekend. Enjoy. Download file Stay tuned for the release date for the book, The ABCs of Community Broadband: How Digital Transitions will Transform America's Communities, One at a Time, which should become available for purchase around the end of the month. Posted on July 18, 2008 at 02:59 PM | Comments (0) MetroNetIQ's First Book Hits the Presses
It's been an exciting effort to produce our first book! It's at the publishers now and with any luck will be available within the next couple of weeks on Amazon and through this website. Here's the back cover language, which says a lot about why I wrote this book ... With Municipal Wireless on the ropes recently, many wonder what's next. The one sure thing is digital transition - all communities must go through a transition to digital, replacing labor and paper-based processes with more efficient digital tools and processes. Because digital equipment runs on multiple types of wired and wireless commercial and private broadband networks, new alternatives are now made available for those communities ready to cast their lot with the 21st century. All it takes is a little planning, some nerve, a dash of leadership, some conversation, a little more planning, some funding, and of course, good luck. That may sound daunting, and it is, until one considers the alternative - economic stagnation and more of the same. The good news is that when it comes to public approaches to broadband, Municipal Wireless may be toast, but that phase is over, and it was just a beginning, not the end. With lessons learned over five years of experimentation, Community Broadband and Digital Transitions are teed up and ready to go to work - all that's missing is the orientation to help civic leaders recognize the opportunity at hand and realize that our society is at the dawn of a new era, where creativity and the harnessing of human resources offer hope to all of America's communities. The ABCs of Community Broadband provides the orientation. There's also the will to embrace the future. That challenge lies ahead for our local community leaders. I wrote this book because most of what the layman/laywoman hears about this industry is through one of the many and sundry newspaper or magazine articles documenting how screwed up Municipal Wireless is. Casual readers have not had an opportunity to learn what we have. The fact is, it's a pretty good technology, for what it does. Mostly what they've read has been the bad news, which is the other fact - the business model it was launched under did Wi Fi Mesh a tremendous disservice. It was never meant to do the things the industry tried to make it do, like solve the Digital Divide. Fugggedaboutit! But it all gets looped into the same article and the take away is "Wi Fi?" Municipal Wireless" "I heard that was a big, big mess!" and the next thought is "I don't want anything to do with it!" This story needs to be told, and there are details that need to be soaked up before the casual reader - and this fits many of our business and government leaders at the local level, when it comes to broadband - really has an opportunity to understand what they are walking away from, and what they are accepting in terms of their future economic potential. It doesn't make sense to leave good tools sitting on the bench when they're ready to go to work. Metropolitan Broadband, Community Broadband, Digital Transition - however you call it - there is tremendous potential in these technologies for those communities that are diligent and deliberate and focus on efficiency. We still waste so much money doing things the old way in our local governments, because "that's the way we've always done it." And just think about where the internet will go when everyone gets on board - so let's start building infrastructure, for Pete's Sake! Here's the Table of Contents - I'll keep you all posted as the book comes on-line, and I hope you all will go buy one or more copies. Baby needs a new pair of shoes! Table of Contents 7 Introduction Posted on July 16, 2008 at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) Innovation for Savings - Focus on Field Digital Transition as a Way to Get StartedFive Ways to Innovate During Budget Cuts - Government Technology This article caught my eye and I bookmarked it a few weeks back. I've been busy finishing a book that I'll talk about in the next post, so I haven't been putting much up on the site lately. I'm intrigued because this article suggests that there's something positive and constructive IT managers can do, even in the face of budget cuts. These hard economic times can be depressing, certainly, but worse, they risk being compounded by bad morale when we feel disempowered by events beyond our control. Author David Raths highlights five things CIOs are implementing today, even as bad times seem to get worse and worse. Details after the jump. 1. Increase efficiency through consolidation. 2. Make a budget case. 3. Look more proactively at outsourcing. 4. Create an IT standards team. 5. Improve service offerings. The bottom line: A smaller budget doesn't mean an end to innovation. Through consolidation, careful budget planning, and other proactive measures, CIOs can increase efficiency and productivity. I would add a separate category that would focus on how the IT budget is spent on mobile activities. The solutions above, as with most public sector IT focus, concern organizational shifts and/or events inside the buildings. It's amazing how little time and effort are spent on the mobile environment, when one considers that about half of the entire public sector workforce in most cities spends a considerable amount of time away from their desk, out in the field. Those workers are still following business processes from the 20th century, and in many cases, they are notoriously unproductive when separated from their desk environment. I call this area Field Digital Transition, and we'll be writing more and more about this subject in coming months.
Posted on July 16, 2008 at 07:39 AM | Comments (0) The Young and the RestlessSpoiler Alert - despite this video clip above of a famous soap opera, this post has nothing to do with soap operas! Sorry! Go back to surfing if you came here looking for soap opera coverage! No, the "Young and the Restless" does not refer to the sex-filled soap opera, but to those who chomp at the bit for a more digital society. The attached brief explores the developing Generation Gap brought on by the rapid changes in digital technology. Do You Speak "Digital?" As the first decade of the new millennium nears its conclusion, children in the developed world who never knew a non-digital life are maturing and entering the workforce. To them, broadband is nothing special. To them, being unconnected for even a moment is unthinkable, regardless of location. So different is the perspective of this new generation from prior generations, it's as if they speak a different language. At best, adults who came of age before personal computers (or even before the internet) can adapt, but they will never see the world the same as those who grew up immersed in digital technology, just as someone who learns a foreign language will never speak as well as a native speaker. That difference in perspective when it comes to digital policy is the nature of the gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. While any generalization such as this is prone to errors and abuse (all members of one generation are not alike, for instance), it does have value in describing a general trend and the potential implications.
That Was Then Political leaders in the US today grew up in a different world. The average age of members in the US Senate is 62, and with leadership based on seniority, many committee chairmen are over 70. The average age of members of the U.S. Senate is older than it has ever been, according to Senate Historian Richard Baker. For many senators, advanced age is starting to show, raising questions about their ability to govern. Health Problems Pose Governing Challenge
So the "old men of computing," inventors of the Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Office, and the World Wide Web, were all born in 1955, a year when the "old men of politics," our national political leadership, were graduating from high school, slide rules in hand. Back when our senators graduated high school: This list could go on and on - the point is that life was very different, just a short two generations ago, different in many ways ... the world has changed immeasurably in the past 50 years, and in big chunks, decade by decade. The really big digital impacts didn't even begin until 25 years ago, when our leaders were well into their 40s. The world of the last century is gone forever, but many who vote continue to elect leadership that looks backward instead of to the future. Many of those who resist change and deny its significance either don't understand it fully, underestimate its impacts, or simply resent the pace of change. As younger people begin to get politically active, they offset the votes of their older parents and grandparents. As those who value technology stand up in the political process to demand technological sophistication from their leaders, we can hope to begin to see informed lawmaking in Washington, DC. TechPresident is a website helpful for tracking the twin issues of technology and the presidential race. But until the day arrives that our national political leaders are well versed in technology, federal government will lag progressive local governments, where younger people in select communities have a more immediate, louder voice for political leadership. Kids send text messages to their friends hourly (or more often than that). They view email as "old fashioned." They use social networking websites like MySpace and facebook as a way of staying connected. Given a choice, they would rather have their cable TV service cut off than their broadband internet account. The 2008 presidential contest demonstrates this digital generation gap. Just compare the two candidates and campaigns. Young people have flocked to the Obama campaign, for instance, accessing the campaign website to get involved (the website is an example of optimal leveraging of digital connectivity). In contrast, John McCain, a generation removed from Barack Obama, recently admitted that he does not even use a PC or the internet personally, but relies on his wife to stay connected. The McCain campaign website, while improved, remains dramatically less developed to reflect new digital tools like MySpace and facebook. Digital Adolescents Stuck in Digital Puberty As a society, we're like confused teenagers beset with hormones when it comes to digital issues. We need to learn to live in a new mode, but for now, we're stuck in a Digital Adolescence, between the analog childhood that to which we had grown so accustomed - predictable, relatively slow, high touch - and the digital adulthood that is now a fact of life and that we know deep down is our destiny - forever changing, fast-paced, hard, technology-based. When did this happen to us? We had a long, slow run up with the Rise of Computers from the 1960s through the 1980s, then we crossed the Rubicon sometime around 1995. (Some may argue that we're still in an Information Age, but the Internet marked a significant disruptive transition from the Information Age to the Network Age.) Being connected is distinctly different from being dependent on information. Since the Rise of the Internet a little over 10 years ago, we've experienced many different attitudes, but mostly we've been collectively in denial as the internet matures and grinds away at our institutions. For many, if not most in society, these changes lie under the surface, unrecognized, subliminal. But they affect us all, nevertheless, and we see more and more evidence of change, and the need to adjust, if we just open our eyes. Once you've had this realization, it's hard not to notice the evidence all around. The significant changes associated with transitioning from Analog to Digital, from stand-alone to connected, from fixed to mobile, constitute one of the biggest challenges our society faces today. Adjusting to change has to be one of the hardest things to do in life, yet we all have to do it as we age, so it's one of the most universal of themes. As societies go, adjusting to change can be seen as a barometer of health: healthy societies adjust, less healthy ones don't. The least healthy societies get stuck and close themselves off from any outside influence in order to stay the same: just think of Cuba and North Korea. Change and Grief Recognizing this state of Digital Puberty that we've entered is not unlike going through the five stages of grief in the Kubler-Ross model, because such significant change involves a death and a rebirth. In the end, allowing oneself to be reborn, to reemerge from the process of change, involves accepting the death of the previous state. Until then, one remains stuck.
Kubler-Ross, a psychologist who studied the reactions of those who had been diagnosed with mortal illnesses, developed a model that has since been widely applied to a variety of catastrophic personal loss situations (job, income, freedom). Since this model gained widespread acceptance, we've gained a better understanding of how people deal with change and its accompanying loss. Some claim that any significant personal change can elicit these stages as a reaction. Change, even positive change, demands a response, and as change can often be seen as a threat, responses to change are not always positive. When it comes to technology change, we initially tend to deny that a change is all that significant. But as the years pass, companies rise and fall, and society changes. Who can argue that we are not a significantly different society than we were 10 years ago, a mere blink of an eye when it comes to history? Just one decade ago, who had even heard of broadband, of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, etc., etc., etc.? Recognizing changes and doing something about them is not easy. We have all kinds of terms for those who fail to grow up, from the "Peter Pan Syndrome" to the more recent "Failure to Launch." Part of the challenge in dealing with such radical change comes from a lack of leadership. When we have leaders who look back instead of looking forward, as a society we're hamstrung. We become stuck in distracting and unproductive debates that stall any progress and divert our energies from adjusting to change to preserving the status quo. We persist in acting like rebellious teenagers, holding on to our childish ways in the face of change, denying the need to accept our progress into an adult world of hard decisions and consequences. Communication, or the inability to communicate, is a major theme in how a society adjusts to change. Parents struggle with change every day. Parents the world over share a common bond: wanting the best for their children. Parents struggle against the vagaries of fate that threaten their children. Education is the Key Because we all care about our children, we are more willing as a society to spend for our children, especially when it comes to education. Accepting the burden of educating their young ones, for the future of the society and the economy, has become a sign of a modern society. In the realm of metropolitan broadband, the intersection of municipal government and the university community, as well as the larger city community life and the secondary education system are the keys to engineering dramatic changes related to technology. And as an added bonus, the K-12 and higher education environments offer ready access to the younger generations who embrace technological change. There is a crying need for leaders to start acknowledging the dramatically different perspectives we have on technology and society, especially considering the options we choose to educate our youth, and methods we choose to improve our situation. Many secondary schools are still slow, distressingly so, to adapt to the trend of incorporating digital tools. Still relying on textbooks that quickly go out of date, these schools lament budget shortfalls but do not consider digital alternatives that offer more relevance to digital lifestyle perspectives, more flexibility for information management, and lower total cost of ownership. Technology is dramatically changing everything, including how we can or should educate our youth. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson is a book that is chock-full of good information and references regarding the potential uses of technology in the classroom. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams also does a good job describing and investigating the societal impact of technology changes. A digital transition through a community-based metropolitan broadband network project may start off as an innovative way for citizens to get city services more efficiently and to make broadband access more affordable. One hundred years ago, earlier generations were inspired to donate land and create land-grant universities, to ensure that future generations would have the education they needed to build a modern lifestyle and sustain a healthy economy. In that sense, digital transitions and metropolitan broadband networks may be but one more step on a well worn path, where the young and the restless focus the efforts of society on our society's youth, for the sake of all in our society and for a better future. ATTRIBUTION REQUIREMENT - The reader is encouraged to link to this post and to share this material, with the understanding that they provide an attribution to MetroNetIQ and share any alterations with MetroNetIQ.
Posted on July 07, 2008 at 06:12 PM | Comments (0) NEST, the Creative Class, and Economic DevelopmentAs both individuals and communities made up of individuals, we start with Talent, we develop Skills, we gain Experience, and we create Social Networks. When we put these four elements together, we get what I call NEST: A Model for Enhancement of Potential. While all have tremendous potential to grow along these various lines, most of us fall far short, both as individuals and as communities, when we fail to plan for such growth in a deliberate fashion. Communities that do plan in deliberate fashion compete to attract creative talent, what some call the Creative Class. Attracting such talent to a community with technology infrastructure like a Metropolitan Broadband Network is a key element in a region's Economic Development strategy. Such are the themes explored below in the attached issue brief. NEST
Communities are part of larger networks, linked not only by geography. Communities of like size often share many things in common. Communities in similar situations have much to learn from each other. The value of developing a network of communities is the strength inherent in association. Cultivating a network involves short-term habits and activities that grow into an investment that will pay dividends over the long-term.
Experience is cumulative and in the best of worlds, is progressive. That is to say, one can gain the same experience over and over, but each successive experience, while reinforcing, provides less and less value. On the other hand, one can actively seek and gain new experiences that build on previous experiences, providing either more depth or breadth of experience, either of which can have value, depending on the goals.
NEST as a Structure to Understand Potential Starting out as individuals, we each have latent talents that we each develop over time (or do not) into realized talent. Moving beyond talents to skills, we begin from birth to develop skills from the most basic skills to the enhanced skill levels. With some time, experience is gained - both positive and negative. Moving from initial experience to new experience levels only comes with time. Finally, the true achievement of potential is in society, intentionally learning to expand an initial social network into a professional social network. Communities are nothing more than groups of individuals who share something in common, from geographic location (neighborhood), to interests (affiliate association) to government (city or town). Communities can improve their odds for success by targeting high value individuals, a group of people that author and economic development guru Richard Florida called the “creative class” in a series of books and lectures earlier this decade. Starting with his 2002 NY Times bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Richard Florida penned a work that might be called a 21st Century Economic Development bible. For anyone involved in city government at the leadership level, or in an Economic Development role, even at the staff level, this book is recommended reading. Florida, a PhD in Regional Economic Development, formerly of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and now at George Mason University outside our nation's capital of Washington, D.C., demonstrated his pioneer spirit and big thinking by stepping out to create a new vocabulary for a change in society. Often those who get to name something do quite well, and that seems to be Florida's path, as he was first to perceive, then name a shift in working behavior patterns. Florida recognized the advent of a new class of workers with new ideas about working and living as a new demographic category, which he labeled the "Creative Class." Work life has evolved over the past 125 years, Florida explains, changing society as the nature of work has changed. Agriculture was the dominant category once, but the Industrial Revolution brought more and more workers into the city in search of more preferable Industrial jobs, making that the dominant category for much of the 20th Century. But by the second half of the last century we began to see the rise of the Service Sector, where workers provided services to various segments of society. Florida notes that more and more, there are new Creatives, who do not fit into any of these previous three categories, and who represent a sea change in their approach to working and living. Those in this new Creative Class make a living using their brains, and many are highly paid. Unlike those before them, they tend to choose a place to live first, and a job second. They don't proceed from job interviews to the location where their new employer sends them. They identify an area first, then seek jobs in that area. Those areas chosen by the Creative Class seem to score high on what Florida calls the Three Ts: Talent, Technology, and Tolerance. First, workers seek a high concentration of workers with talent like themselves, reasoning that there will be plentiful jobs in the area, and acknowledging that the average tenure for their types of jobs tends to be measured in a few years rather than in decades like their parents generation. They want to know that they will have choices when its time to move on, so they won't have to move away. Second, workers seek a concentration of technology, the engine of economic growth in this new economy and an employer of choice for Creatives. Third, they seek an Open Society characterized by tolerance for diversity. Florida cites such measures as the Bohemia Index and the Gay Index, two ways to measure and compare cities and rank them according to diversity and tolerance (if a society is tolerant of gays and hippies, it is likely to be tolerant of newcomers of various ethnic backgrounds, so the reasoning goes). These creative types who live alternative lifestyles tend to congregate in cities that are open and accepting of diversity, and it's no coincidence that these same cities attract a large proportion of the Creative Class workers. The bottom line lesson for those interested in Digital Transitions and Metropolitan Broadband is the connection here between having a technology asset such as a citywide wireless network and fitting in with cities like Austin, San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle. In addition to ranking high on Florida's Creative Class criteria, all of these cities successfully attract creative workers in droves AND are out in front in terms of ensuring ubiquitous affordable broadband access, of both the wired and wireless varieties. The best approaches to economic development highlight the attractive differences of a community, city or region. Traditional approaches to economic development stress such attractions as regional assets, culture, sound infrastructure that supports and sustains economic activity, and even provide inducements such as tax breaks, tax credits, or even free land or office space. In contrast, the Creative Class approach suggests a new approach, to gather together a dynamic community of talented individuals that has better potential than other communities. With his three Ts approach, Florida suggests an economic development strategy that focuses less on hard assets, but seeks rather to attract Talent by leveraging Technology infrastructure and opportunity and fostering a Tolerant social climate. The NEST model for Enhancement of Potential suggests an additional area of focus for a community. By first identifying, attracting and developing Talent, a community makes the most of what it has. By building in a program to add Skills and develop its human resources, a community goes further to enhance its potential. Through a deliberate program of gathering relevant Experiences, a community moves further and further down the learning curve and becomes ever more attractive, capable of supporting a growing array of jobs and industries, and weathering the inevitable economic downturns. Finally, by creating a Social Network of like communities and sharing knowledge and insights, a community moves ahead of its competition and becomes even more resilient, attractive, and in the long run, a sustainable society. Like individuals, communities, towns, villages and cities start out with a defined set of talents, skills, and experiences. What they do with what they had to start with determines the extent to which they ultimately live up to their potential. We all start out with a unique DNA, but we develop a brand as we go through life. It's the same with communities. Some are blessed with bounteous resources, others with natural beauty, still others with location: proximity to the sea, a river, a mountain pass or to valuable trade routes. Some are blessed with all these advantages. But most communities are not so blessed. For those communities who are so lacking, they can find hope in the fact that all communities are comprised of individuals. All communities have the potential to develop an environment that will bring out the best of those individuals. All communities have the potential to attract the best and the brightest based on the atmosphere they create in their local areas. As Dr. Florida suggests, cities like Austin, San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle staked a claim to be leaders in the new economic order by their focus on human capital. By creating a brand as attractive destinations for the best and brightest of the new Creative Class, these cities and others who choose to go down this path seek to grow and build in the areas that will have value in the 21st century. Digital Transitions and Metropolitan Broadband Networks are strategies to create the foundational technology base on which a community can establish its own brand as a Creative Class community. Whether or not investing in digital infrastructure and new digital business processes attracts any new creative class talent, it remains a strategy to draw out the most potential of the community along the lines of the NEST model.
Posted on July 06, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) The Coming ExaFlood
This is the ... Internet ... I know, it looks like an internal view of the eye, or something. But this is what the internet is - a conglomeration of various local networks of different sizes. Some say there's a flood a' comin'... I'm not sure about that, but I know that the internet is an ever bigger part of our lives, and we're in a very dynamic situation where what we considered "a whole lot" two years ago is "not that much" two years from now... This brief addresses the growing need for internet bandwidth - communications infrastructure capacity at the backbone and last mile, being driven by a multitude of factors.
How Much is "Enough?" Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute gave this nascent debate the name "ExaFlood" in his January 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial, entitled The Coming ExaFlood. The word exabyte is the basis for the term "ExaFlood", the neologism created by Swanson. The Exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing torrent of data transmitted over the Internet - it's a classic case of demand for bandwidth out pacing supply. The amount of information people upload, download and share on the Internet is growing at an exponential rate (due in large part to video, audio and photo applications). Meanwhile the capacity of the Internet, its bandwidth, remains limited and susceptible to a "flood" of data. At the Broadband Properties Summit 2007, a panel on the ExaFlood raised a challenge. The panel: David Kozischek, Corning Cable Systems; and David McClure - U.S. Internet Industry Association; Larry Irving, Internet Innovation Alliance. The Challenge: How will the Internet handle the estimated traffic in the near to mid-term? The key point driven home in this fascinating keynote panel discussion was this: Not one, but several signs indicate a growing issue, if not a coming crisis. Whether the ExaFlood represents an an issue, a crisis, or a market opportunity is a matter of perspective, however. Whether there is a growing need for bandwidth is not. The FTTH Council Video on the ExaFlood, summarized in the Signposts inset above and shown below, provides a quick overview of the themes of this discussion. A Matter of Scope When faced with any problem, it helps to put it into perspective before spending too much time on a solution. When it comes to the "ExaFlood," how much do we know about data and the internet? The amount of traffic on the Web has grown dramatically over its short lifetime, and it continues to show strong signs of growth.
Growth is driven by three primary factors: first, number of users - how many access the Web daily; second, frequency - the number of times each user accesses the Web; and third, bandwidth, the type of content that flows over the Web. All three of those factors are on the rise, but it's the third - the type of content - that is most worrisome. The rise of video content, especially high definition video, dramatically increases the amount of data traffic. According to Doug McClure of the US Internet Industry Association, print is not the problem, per se. Where a typewritten page is about 2,000 bytes, and a small graphic image is about 100 kilobytes, the complete works of Shakespeare about 5 megabytes, and an entire pickup full of books about a gigabyte, it would take a billion of those pickup trucks to amount to a single exabyte. It's video that is the bandwidth hog. Standard definition video consumes 450 times the bandwidth of a regular web browsing session, but high definition video bumps that to 2,700 times the bandwidth. YouTube Growth JANUARY 29, 2007 YouTube videos comprise two percent of all Internet traffic. Surveys: Internet Traffic Touched by YouTube JUNE 19, 2007 In six months, YouTube video traffic has grown from two to ten percent of all internet traffic. YouTube Comprises 10% Of All Internet Traffic | WebProNews FEBRUARY 1, 2008 Six months later, YouTube video traffic comprises 20% of all internet traffic. Alexa.com YouTube traffic statistics However one looks at it, this is a statistically significant growth curve that supports the concerns about the ultimate capacity of the internet, fast becoming as critical an infrastructure as our electric grid. The Consequences of Growth As more and more Internet traffic is video traffic, and as more and more subscribers start using broadband to gain access to the Internet, we will face some mixture of these consequences, to an ever growing degree. First, without significant investment in infrastructure, continued growth in network traffic is likely to result in network performance degradation, most likely in the form of slower uploading and downloading. One significant consequence is pressure to manage the Demand Side (i.e., Net Neutrality debate). As one follows this debate, one quickly recognizes the political agenda - there usually is a political agenda when looming shortages and the need for a change in public policy enter the picture. The ExaFlood and Net Neutrality debates are - inevitably - interwoven, and predictably, political. A driver of the conditions that create the Net Neutrality issue in the first place is the scarcity of broadband bandwidth. Incumbents argue for the need to differentiate on service pricing in the face of scarce bandwidth. The ExaFlood is all about scarce infrastructure. Moves by ISPs to suspend heavy users or cut them off entirely reflect the sense of scarcity. Political pressure to allow ISPs to charge varying rates for different levels of service or on the other side, to prohibit different levels of service are each signs of looming issues. Incentives to manage the Supply Side may be a preferred alternative. While there will be increasing business incentives to build more last-mile broadband infrastructure, political incentives may be another way to stimulate broadband infrastructure growth that would relieve such scarcity. Clearly, when it comes to broadband, efforts to fit all this increasing traffic into an already tight pipe (i.e., current network capacity) must be contrasted with some effort to figure out a way to get a robust sustainable infrastructure built out. Anyway this issue is sliced, we're going to have to spend more capital on broadband infrastructure. We should be talking about the best ways to get this infrastructure built. Fiber v. Wireless Broadband In the face of ever growing demand for bandwidth, we need both the infinite capacity of fiber broadband, and the ubiquitous mobility and utility of wireless broadband ... we need to meet the ever growing need for both bandwidth and mobility. We need wired solutions like Cable, and DSL, and wherever possible, FTTH, for reliable connectivity when we are in a fixed position, like at home or at work. We need wireless solutions like cellular wireless and wireless broadband when we are mobile and away from our normal fixed locations. Hot Spots, by the way, are not really adequate substitutes for a mobile solution. They're a portable solution - not mobile, but an alternate fixed location while roaming. Wireless and wired broadband should be considered two equally valid, complementary technologies. Asking which is better pre-supposes that there is a certain need being filled and that wired and wireless are comparable solutions to fill that need. Most times, one is better than the other - the variable is the need for capacity v. the need for mobility. In considering the need for both FTTH and wireless broadband - not one or the other - an apt analogy is " The 747 and the Helicopter." The 747 is hard to beat if the objective is to move a large number of people economically and comfortably over a very long distance, say, over an ocean or between continents. The helicopter is the best solution if the objective is to move a small number of people or things from any one location to another, generally over a relatively short distance, irrespective of airports and runways. There is no better network for capacity than fiber - FTTH offers nearly infinite capacity and long-term viability because of its physics. But there is no better network for mobility than wireless broadband - Wi Fi Mesh offers a relatively low-cost wireless solution that goes up relatively quickly, then provides far more bandwidth than a cellular air card solution to far more people. Which should come first, capacity or mobility? On the one hand, a small town may opt for a FTTH solution first, because they have very poor alternatives for triple play services, and little need for mobility. But after the network is in place they may grow more interested in a Wi Fi Mesh network, because with fiber widely available, the price of Wi Fi Mesh goes down, and its utility goes up. On the other hand, another town, perhaps a little larger than the previous one, may opt for wireless broadband because they already enjoy adequate competition for triple play service, but their city government operations could benefit from more options for mobile solutions. But after the wireless mobile broadband solution is in place, the value that the community places on broadband goes up, and there may be a more compelling appreciation for the benefits of FTTH. It's a matter of priorities and at some point, after some experience is gained, it's about awareness and perspective. But in every case, we must come to some agreement that we all will need both the infinite capacity of FTTH and the ubiquitous mobility of wireless broadband, before all is said and done. Some of us will get it sooner than others. And those local populations that adopt broadband lifestyles, whether fixed or mobile, are more likely to devote the resources needed to get the other. The Debate on Solutions Advocates of Net Neutrality tend to argue in favor of flat pricing for access and separation of infrastructure ownership and/or management service from content delivery service (structural unbundling). Opponents of Net Neutrality argue for continuation of status quo vertical integration, variable pricing options to ensure quality of service and network management flexibility and little-to-no regulation to ensure adequate (abundant) revenue sufficient to finance network construction. There is significant distrust on both sides of the argument, and lots of history.
Source: Wikipedia article on "Bit" But back to the approaching shortage of bandwidth. The first question is whether one believes that there even is a coming shortage. Debates about other shortages seem more long-term - the coming oil shortage as we approach Hubbert's Peak, the theory about approaching finite limits of oil production on the planet; or projections of world population growth and coming food shortages and famine (see also the Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome and Thomas Malthus). The difference is that while the Club of Rome's projections of disaster and calamity have been proven wrong (so far), and Hubbert's Peak remains an unknown (so far), the ExaFlood dilemma seems more immediate and real, and we can still imagine that the problem is somewhat manageable. Drowning in the ExaFlood gives an interesting counterpoint to this suggestion of a coming "flood" of data transmission shortage. Author Tim Lee, a fellow at the Libertarian Cato Institute, makes the argument that we are facing less of a "flood" of bandwidth shortage and more of a simple extension of the continuing need for telecom firms to build out their infrastructure, which supports his rationale for government to get out of the way. Bring On The Exaflood by Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary of commerce under President Bush, and Larry Irving, former assistant secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton - both currently co-chairmen of the Internet Innovation Alliance - embrace the problem and see solutions at hand, as follows. All sides agree that we need ongoing investment in content, massive upgrades of infrastructure and relentless innovation to handle the phenomenal growth in data traffic. We need advancements in how we build and operate networks, including new file compression technologies, upgraded traffic management software, better spam and virus filters, and new delivery platforms. And we need substantial investments in short-haul bandwidth through fiber to homes, broadband over power lines, satellites and fourth-generation wireless networks. The formula for encouraging such extraordinary investments is clear: minimize tax and regulatory constraints and maximize competition. Policymakers across the nation have ample opportunity to implement this blueprint right away. They should pass common-sense legislation such as permanently extending the Internet tax moratorium, building broadband-ready public housing, and cutting depreciation schedules for network equipment and infrastructure. The Bottom Line The ever growing demand for bandwidth appears to be quite real, but also incremental, so it need not be a crisis. But it deserves much greater attention and more creativity. The ExaFlood scenario makes a strong argument on all sides to build out real broadband infrastructure at both the backbone (transport) and last mile levels (100 Mbs - 1Gbs) ASAP. Such speeds mean fiber in all its forms - nothing else will get us those speeds and be truly future-proof, or in this case, Exa-Ready. And the need for infrastructure means letting go of limiting the number of players in the infrastructure business. We need more energy and creativity to accomplish such a Herculean task. Conferences and articles may be good to raise the hue and cry and get people motivated and busy. But this is a project no less exciting than building the railroad network was in the 19th Century, and it demands the attention of leaders at all levels. We should be building out broadband networks, both wired and wireless, as robustly as possible. Given these trends of exploding data needs, most especially the growing popularity of video applications in all their forms, we appear to be at little risk of overbuilding (certainly out on the edge we are not). We are quite likely to see an unending need for bandwidth in the foreseeable future.
Posted on June 30, 2008 at 06:26 AM | Comments (0) The World Wide Web: W3, Web 2.0 and Beyond(Amazing video on Web 2.0 - check it out before reading on - you'll want to watch it a couple of times, it's so chock full of images.) There follows a brief on all things World Wide Web. Lots and lots of links. Be sure to watch both of the YouTube videos on this post, you won't regret it!
The internet is the system of connected local area networks, the network of networks that uses Internet Protocol (IP) language as a common system of data transfer. The World Wide Web - 'Web" for short - is the system of hypertext documents connected by hyperlinks, accessed via a Web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc.) over the internet. The concept of the Web has to do with how we extract value out of internet connectivity, and significant changes are afoot, highlighted by what has come to be called Web 2.0. The Web Grows Up Web 2.0 is a good jumping off point to discuss the evolution and implications of the World Wide Web. More important than the term Web 2.0 is the evolution it embodies. Web 2.0 as a label emerged at the Web 2.0 Conference in 2004 sponsored by Tim O'Reilly. So far, feedback on this concept is wide-ranging, from "it's a load of hype" to "it's the second coming of the Web." For the unitiated, Wikipedia is a great resource on the relatively new phenomenon of Web 2.0 - see both the Web 2.0 listing, as well as the entire Web 2.0 Category listing. At its most simple, Web 2.0 is a term that describes what the Web is becoming: websites are more and more interactive, now including features like YouTube video clips, blogs, wikis and podcasts - tools for interactivity - that provide much more utility than older websites, which tended to be more static presentations of information, with limited e-commerce capabilities. Here's a synopsis of what the Web looks like (looked like, this was written nearly three years ago): The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive. How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan. The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.
This website also includes a list of the Best (Or Most Interesting) Web 2.0 Definitions and Explanations - as well as The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. The Meme A meme -a new word for self-propagating units of cultural information - is a great example of the new Web 2.0 world, where people are connected and enabled to circulate ideas at the speed of light. The "meme map" above is an early attempt to forge a group consensus on the concept of Web 2.0. Note the fluid, dynamic nature of the Web. The Web is vast, decentralized, democratic, and dynamic, changing and evolving before our very eyes. The Web has become transcendent, so we must approach it peripherally to grasp and describe it. Web 2.0 is actually a meme itself. It created quite a buzz in 2005 and 2006, but has been criticized as one more example of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which sees exaggerated interest in any new technology typically followed by a commensurate dramatic fall off of interest, then a discovery of true value as understanding of the technology and its utility takes hold. Much of the material available to understand Web 2.0 is indeed from the 2005-2006 time period.
Web 2.0 Tag Cloud image from Wikipedia Web 2.0 Applications One way to understand Web 2.0 is to look at software applications that embody the new Web approach. MySpace and facebook are emblems of the social networking trend, where the Web is used in new ways to connect people with other people. Google Maps is a powerful tool that puts the user out in space, looking down on the planet. Flickr lets us all share our photos with each other; YouTube does the same with our home movies. Del.icio.us introduces the concept of tagging and bookmarks, more Web-oriented ways to label what we put out on the Web, and find what we're looking for. Looking at information organization is a good departure to better understand Web 2.0. Tagging, bookmarking, and tag clouds, like the one in the graphic above, are new ways of organizing information into folksonomies, a means to access information more accommodating to the decentralized nature of the Web than the traditional taxonomies of static categories and subcategories. David Weinberger's book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder shows that the way we deal with information has transformed with a maturing Web. Search Engines provide us a tool so that we no longer have to have "a place for everything and everything in its place," at least when it comes to the digital "everythings" in our lives. We can leave them in a "big, messy pile," and when everything is tagged with descriptors, we just need a good search engine and a knack for describing our search problem to find what we're looking for - we don't need to remember where we filed the item. According to a review on Boing Boing, we've traditionally divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another (they can't be in all the places they might belong). But computers and the Internet turn this approach on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, at little to no cost, and because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncratically with "tags," the hierarchy, best characterized by the Dewey Decimal system we grew up with in libraries, has become an outdated mode to organize information - at least when it concerns digital information. Web 2.0 Principles and Lessons Tim O'Reilly laid out these underlying principles that led him and his colleagues to come up with this terminology and the lessons learned with this new "Web 2.0 perspective." (see What Is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, published on-line on September 30, 2005). 1. The Web is a platform where the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage, i.e., build bridges to more data, not fences around your data (e.g., Google). Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head (e.g., Overture and AdSense). The service automatically gets better the more people use it (e.g., BitTorrent).
2. Embrace the power of the web to harness collective intelligence, so that network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance (e.g., Wikipedia). Blogs are the best example of this principle. ... like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value. 3. Data is the next Intel Inside, as data become the building blocks for Web 2.0 applications (e.g., GoogleMaps). O'Reilly envisions a coming battle over control as data owners line up against applications that seek to leverage that data. 4. End of the Software Release Cycle. When software is viewed as a service rather than a product, operations that ensure service quality become a core competency, users become co-developers, and development moves from an episodic activity characterized by releases, to a constant activity marked by fluid updates. 5. Lightweight programming models drive several shifts, lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems, a preference for syndication over coordination, and designs that anticipate being hacked and mixed on the back end (designers start the process and let the hordes of smart programmers leverage their creativity to continue the process beyond the original vision, in new - and unpredictable - directions).
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device is a paradigm shift required by web-based businesses, where the web and web services pull together resources to provide a service not possible without a network paradigm. iTunes and TiVo are examples of services that manage data as a service and leverage network dynamics. 7. Rich User Experiences. As new applications are written with the Web as a platform, the creators can leverage not only the new capabilities that network dynamics make available, but also the best of the old PC-based applications, which results in a delightful, new, rich user experience. This transition provides new companies with a great opportunity, and incumbents with an ongoing challenge. Adapting to a New World Order
Graham highlights three points in his blog about Web 2.0. First, he says consider the new ways of designing Web applications that are more intuitive and easier to use, with the help of tools like Ajax. Second, he says that democracy matters in the Web 2.0 world, highlighting things like Wikipedia and blogs, where normal people have access through the Web to make a difference, to gain an audience, and to impact the business world without having to go through the establishment, VCs, or an editor. Finally, Graham says that the new mantra of "Don't Maltreat Users" is vital to Web 2.0. When an average Joe can reach millions through the Web, millions who interact at their leisure, it makes good business sense for a Web 2.0 business to be as affordable and user-friendly as it can be, to prevent competitors from undercutting the business plan and to keep those millions coming back. If a Web 2.0 business is not on its toes, its audience can fly away in a heartbeat. Respect for the customer has moved to the front of the line. This lack of initial "stickiness" is a huge difference between the old and new worlds on the Web. In the Web 2.0 world, there are severe and immediate consequences for not putting one's best foot forward with customers. That's good news for customers, bad news for more traditional, less hyper competitive businesses and organizations. The rapid advances being made with Web 2.0 companies should indicate to cities the pace of change and changing expectations. The days of of playing it safe and getting by with minimal change as a late adopter are ending, or at least, they carry an ever higher cost. City officials, just like private sector business people, must recognize the need to adapt to the trends expressed by Web 2.0 companies because citizens are users and increasingly will have these same tools at their disposal. The environment is changing more rapidly than we think and the business and political structures and practices that we are used to will not be the same in 10 years, maybe even in five years. At the risk of understating the case, the internet and the World Wide Web are intricately connected. Just as computer software and hardware progressed in tandem throughout the early days of the Computer Age, we see the internet and the World Wide Web evolving in similar fashion. Continuous extension of the broadband internet, bringing more and more Web surfers onto the Ethernet waves, will hasten the changes discussed in this analysis of the evolving World Wide Web. Expansion of broadband will be helped along by technologies like Wi Fi Mesh and WiMAX, two technologies that are driving accelerated adoption of community broadband. City leaders can no more choose to avoid the changes of the evolving Web than individuals can. We can turn away, but evolution will progress apace. We withdraw from this march at our own risk, making catching up that much harder to do when we're finally compelled to act.
Posted on June 28, 2008 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0) Quick, Cheap, and Good (Enough)Especially notable in the public sector are the wasted cycles spent trying to please all parties, trying to reach that perfect solution that will meet all the requirements of a project. But as we know living in the real world, its extremely rare to find that perfect solution. This brief outlines the issues associated with seeking the perfect instead of the best solution, and suggests an alternate pathway to get to the destination incrementally rather than in one fell swoop.
Government agencies are most guilty of pursuing, albeit with the best of intentions, the perfect solution at the expense of an adequate, but good solution. Most often this is done by adhering to a rigid process of competitive bidding and formal rules, only to turn away competitive but partial solutions, or worse, to accept the lowest cost solution, one which may well not be the best-fit solution. Too often, the result of this mindset is the opposite of perfect - the worst outcomes - either doing nothing - wasting valuable time and resources - or getting taken to the cleaners. This brief is intended as a challenge to the status quo of public bidding and vendor selection, which too often seeks optimal solutions on behalf of the public interest, but ends up with sub-optimal results. MetroNetIQ suggests that its time for a reality reset when it comes to city government processes and results. Reality Reset We learn through buying and selling, gaining experience in the marketplace, that giving time to a vendor at the door or a salesperson on the phone is an actual commercial exchange - while accepting a vendor overture rarely results in the promises that first come across the threshold, it may well be worth the time if one learns something. In point of fact, "Free" is always subsidized by someone, somewhere, so there is someone picking up the tab out there, carrying an expectation of a payoff, whenever costs are incurred. There's an implied debt whenever a gift is accepted. Beware the gift that comes with strings attached. There is almost always a sacrifice of quality, for instance, when a "free" gift is accepted. It is rare that something of true quality is offered for free. Paying for something should always be acceptable, IF there is a fair exchange of value - that is, in fact, the very definition of commerce. "One can't get something for nothing" is a primary lesson of adulthood that we all must accept and keep in mind, because we're constantly told the opposite by people who want something from us. Growing up means accepting reality, and one of the toughest lessons to learn and relearn is that "free" is not, in fact, "free," no matter how attractive it may look. 2. Low Bid is Not Always Best Bid. If we can't have it for free, we often shouldn't even want it for cheap! This is worth a small digression... The Golden Triangle When it comes to digital transitions and metropolitan broadband projects, all of us are bounded by some basic constraints that govern any procurement or project. There's a business maxim one could call the "Rule of the Business Golden Triangle." You may recognize it by the name of the Project Triangle: you'll no doubt recognize its truths as you read on.
According to the Rule, when it comes to procurements and projects, one cannot have one's cake and eat it too. That's reality in the business world. The three aspects of the golden triangle that control and impact any project manager's prospects are Time (fast v. slow, sooner v. later), Quality (high quality v. low quality), and Money (less expensive v. more expensive). To recognize the truth of the Rule, just try to imagine getting just what one would want - the Best Case: very high quality, immediately, for very little money - let's face it, that's not going to happen, that's a fantasy world. Or imagine the polar opposite, the Worst Case: getting something of very low quality over a long period, with project delays, while spending a lot - unfortunately, that may just happen, and that's getting taken to the cleaners. While one extreme is possible but unlikely (the best case), another is regrettably common (the worst case, above). The rational choices in a procurement or business decision guide the outcomes, and too often the worst case is the result, when better alternatives are available. Alternately, project managers should focus on best possible outcomes in the middle of those two extremes - they should pick two factors that are most important and relax the third constraint: Middle of the Road Outcomes a) Fast and less expensive, but lower quality. Strategy: Lower one's standards (accept less quality or fewer options, usually achieved through extensive planning and negotiation between stakeholders to determine the must-have items and the nice-to-have items and then setting priorities). b) High quality and less expensive, but takes more time. Strategy: Start the project earlier (to be a responsible steward of time as a resource, a city leader would start a low-grade project immediately to get a jump on things and then move at a reasonable pace to allow adequate time to find savings and develop creative approaches that would leverage existing assets or competitive advantages). c) Fast and high quality, but costs more. Strategy: Pay more (budget more to accommodate a higher expense, create a strong business case to justify a financial strategy, identify alternate grant or funding sources, etc.).
The bottom line? If one is interested in digital transition and metropolitan broadband as an option for one's community, one is best served to bring in professional help to find the right fit, devise a strategy, and develop a business case, all of which will position one and allow one and one's city to: There's no substitute for: Getting back then to the Reality Reset of city government processes and results: 3. A changing environment demands adaptation; doing nothing is a choice too. The essence of denial is that if I don't recognize something, if I avoid facing it, then it doesn't exist. Living in denial is alternately seen as childish, immature, or unhealthy behavior. It's often called various things in shorthand: "Burying your head in the sand." "Running away from your problems." "Delaying the inevitable." Traffic increases or economic activity dwindles. Without a clear strategy to monitor a changing world and adapt a city or organization's strategy to manage its position in that world, it becomes inevitable that one's position will decline. Any system faces decline without new energy being fed into it. The concept of Entropy is a physical reality, not readily understood, and even less readily accepted by the psyche - it says that left alone, all things will decay over time, from a state of order to a state of disorder. Quit investing in the future, and watch the world around you slip into decay. If the world is constantly changing, then one must constantly spend energy (time, money, etc.) to adapt in order to stay even, and spend even more energy (time, money, etc.) in order to move ahead and do better than the rest. Doing nothing is a choice, but in a highly dynamic environment, it becomes a choice to fall behind. No longer is it the case where one could pretend that high tech did not matter - to pretend otherwise, to cling to old analog tools and processes, is to accept less efficiency and more cost. That is not to say that all things digital are good, necessary or even effective; to discern the mix between old and new requires an investment of time and attention, to gain the understanding and experience to tell the difference. The silicon chip is now pervasive, and increasingly, connectivity over an IP network is becoming just as pervasive. To deny the need for broadband is to deny reality. To deny the need for mobile broadband is equally evasive, because as new tools become available, they offer an adaptability challenge that we either accept or deny. Going through a digital transition is a matter of When, not If. 5. Life is a Series of Choices and Consequences. Individually and collectively, we each choose to be In the Game or On the Sidelines. There are costs and benefits to either choice, but the reality is that we do not get a third choice. The Reality of Freedom means that there are Choices and there are Consequences. Having to choose is indeed a burden, just as not having an ability to choose is a burden. Life is a burden, that's reality. Freedom of choice places a premium on education and learning to make good choices, profitable choices, beneficial choices, healthy choices, just choices. Refusing to make a choice is in itself a different kind of choice, with its own set of consequences, including the lack of experience that comes with being engaged in a project. Delaying a choice opportunity is a strategy that can be appropriate or inappropriate, given the circumstances at hand. Denying a choice opportunity, at least as an adult in a free society, is an aversion to accepting reality. Sometimes reality can present a series of "bad" choices that can seem like the same as no choice at all. But in that case, we are forced to weigh the outcomes and choose the least bad option - that is reality - to say that there is no choice is to play the victim, to deny that one is in control. On this topic, I'm obliged to share a statement actually made by the CEO of a major corporation where I worked - I was only a week or two into the new job, when I took my first trip to corporate headquarters to attend an annual all-hands conference. The CEO gave a headliner speech, where he described the bleak business environment in our industry at the time and shared this pearl. That was in 1995 - five years later, the 70 year old company was acquired. The CEO was right, but he also steered the company into a safe harbor as his final duty. At the time, I was shocked to hear those words in a public speech, but they stuck with me, 15 years later. The essence of good leadership in bad times is to make hard decisions that offer the best outcome over the long run, with the least pain in the short term. Reality in life is about accepting life as it comes at one and doing the best one can with what one has to work with at the time. It's not all that hard to analyze what we all now face in regards to digital transitions and metropolitan broadband when one accepts reality. The reality we face is that all cities, all organizations, all communities will have to go through a Digital Transition sooner or later. In a sense, a Digital Transition, can be looked at as making the most of a necessary evil, along the lines of the Shit Sandwich analogy.
Having accepted Reality as what it is, we can start having the adult conversation about what a future based on digital tools connected with ubiquitous broadband would look like, and how we can get from here to there. Optimal v. Best Facing Reality is acknowledging that while we would all prefer the perfect, no-risk outcome, it is not attainable. Therefore, we have to look at what is attainable given the current set of constraints and position ourselves to find the best fit at the time. Such a "rough order of magnitude" or "ROM" strategy accepts that there will be time after any decision to improve on the situation and then make subsequent decisions with more options at hand. A ROM strategy assesses the situation and the set of options and compares the indicated outcomes with the default outcome, which is doing nothing and accepting the status quo. If that assessment indicates that the situation is improved with one or more of the options, they can be weighed against each other and one option will be indicated to be the best solution at that time - even better than taking no action at all. Based on the need for quality (and some situations carry grave risks if quality is not maintained), the decision-making process and line of reasoning offered in this brief suggest that a solution that is quick and cheap, most times, may be good enough to move forward. For those times when quality is the standard, then one can choose to move forward quickly, accepting that it will cost more, OR one can choose to use time to one's advantage, saving money by going slowly and deliberately ahead. Whichever of the three options chosen, this analysis suggests that moving forward in a time of rapid change is generally preferable to standing still, all other things being equal.
Posted on June 23, 2008 at 11:48 AM | Comments (1) Digital Video and Voice - Forget About It!VOIP and VoD are two killer apps that are bringing enormous pressure to bear on two very large industries. And broadband internet is driving adoption of both of these applications. For those without broadband access - Forget About It. A Once & Future Killer App One of the worst punishments man can suffer is isolation from others. The sound of another human voice is vital to the human experience. In March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant famously and successfully transformed spoken voice sound waves into electric analog signals to enable voice communication over distances. His "telephone" innovation, patented in that year, proved a social revolution. The term "killer application," or "killer app" for short, means a "technological innovation that has a transformative impact on society." One would have to call Bell's telephone the quintessential killer app, and so it remains.
Telephone innovations progressed over the next one hundred years or so, until a truly dramatic innovation occurred with the adaptation of traditional analog wave transmission services to the digital realities of the internet world. VOIP is dramatically innovative in at least two ways. First, because VOIP is a digital application being provided over the public internet, it provides a competitive alternative to voice communication services provided by a telecom company over proprietary telephone company lines, opening up competitive options that never existed before, which lowers prices and increases service options. Second, because VOIP is not an analog but a digital application, it opens up an array of accompanying add-on services - not available with traditional analog telephony, such as getting voice mails as "WAV" files right there along with your emails. While VOIP turns any laptop into a "soft" telephone, its sound quality still depends on network-provided "quality of service" or "QOS" to prevent dropped packets that cause the voice signal to become choppy. VOIP is a killer app, but is still coming of age and is not widely adopted yet. A Second Killer App Transmission of video content over distances is another killer app of modern life. While the actual moment of the invention of television is a far less documented moment than Bell’s phone call to his assistant, few can argue that television has transformed our lives. Extending television content services to consumers and households has differed from telephone services in several ways. First, the primary television network was wireless. Rather than telephone lines extended to households and businesses to connect telephones at the ends, the television network was comprised a broadcast network of towers and stations, and wireless receivers at the ends - television sets or "TVs" for short.
Second, from the beginning, TV sets were far more complex and expensive devices than telephones. And while telephones, at least until the past few decades, were leased by the telephone company, TVs have always been end devices that were purchased by users. Third, voice content is user-created, while video content was "produced" by professionals and either broadcast "live" or stored on a storage medium and broadcast later. The first major video innovation was to finance content with commercial sponsors, who were allowed to insert advertisements, which came to be known as "commercials," directly into the video programs. This ad-supported content provisioning model allowed content to be broadcast over-the-air for "free" to users who had invested in a TV set. The advent of cable networks, originally intended to provide content services to areas that had poor over-the-air reception of the video signal, changed things dramatically. Cable providers grew into large video distribution companies that generated significant revenue from selling bundled video content. In addition, video became available with the invention of analog VHS video tape players and cassette, which could be purchased, but more often were rented. While digital innovation substituted DVDs for VHS tapes, the business model stayed the same until recently. While professionally produced video over a cable service remains the norm, the rise of broadband internet has made available new services for accessing video content, including streaming video from companies like Netflix, peer-to-peer video content using technology from BitTorrent, and user-produced video content from YouTube. The Triple Play On the backs of their respective killer apps and slim to no competition in local and regional markets, telephone companies and cable MSOs grew into very large, very successful business ventures providing access and content services over their privately-owned networks. In many, if not most markets, telephone and cable companies offered core services under a monopoly franchise. When the internet gained sufficient interest to look like it would be around for a while, first the cable companies, then the telephone companies moved in to provide internet access services that were a step ahead of dial-up internet access in terms of both speed and quality. High-speed internet service, or "broadband" as it came to be known, was until recently loosely defined as "service above 200 Kbs in 'throughput' speed." Of course, the definition of broadband is in the eye of the beholder, and increasingly "broadband" is viewed both domestically and internationally as more in the range of 1.5 - 10 Mbs. In more advanced countries, even these speeds are viewed as relatively slow. Cable companies were first to offer broadband service over their coaxial cable networks, starting in the mid-late 1990s. Telephone companies were late to the game, providing broadband service over their copper wires with a technology they termed "digital subscriber line" or "DSL." To win market share away from their cable competitors, telephone companies offered service that was a little slower, but much less expensive. The strategy worked and now cable and telephone companies together account for nearly all of the residential broadband service in the United States. Broadband has proven a boon for telephone and cable companies for two reasons. First, as their base level offerings come under more competition and revenues decline, broadband revenue has provided high-margin revenues for both telephone and cable companies. Second, offering broadband to their customer base provided cable companies the ability to enter their telephone competitor's space with a competing voice product - VOIP. Having gained some experience with broadband, cable companies recognized that they could provide digital VOIP and offer their customers not only video and broadband, but also voice, for a bundled set of services that came to be called the "Triple Play." In response, the telephone companies soon began to partner with satellite dish networks in order to match the cable Triple Play bundle. Over time, telecom giant Verizon started offering a Triple Play bundle where its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network had been deployed, and as it became capable, ATT did the same under its U-verse label in select markets. Broadband as the Enabler When it comes to new digital innovations in video and voice, broadband is a required element to be able to receive such service. The broadband internet offers consumers an alternate channel to gain access to new voice and video service options. On the voice side, besides the cable company VOIP offer, numerous smaller providers are active. Perhaps the most innovative VOIP application is Skype, which began as a simple software application that could be downloaded to a PC or laptop to enable free VOIP, but both parties to a call had to use the application. The original free Skype service that turned laptops into soft phones was soon joined by SkypeIn and SkypeOut VOIP service that allowed Skype users to make and receive calls to and from regular telephone users for a modest fee. These services have seen strong acceptance for international calls especially, given the high rates prevalent for such calls. On the video side, progress is somewhat slower, as professionally produced cable TV content must be acquired under license before being transmitted over the internet. Netflix has begun to offer VoD movies, and BlockBuster has followed suit. YouTube videos are becoming ever more common on websites, and are especially in evidence during the 2008 political season. As broadband penetration grows, expect both VOIP and VoD options to proliferate, making broadband an even more worthwhile service offer.
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Posted on June 22, 2008 at 04:35 PM | Comments (0) Time for a Second Look at Public Private Partnerships
So far, "Public Private Partnerships" mean that the public sector entity supports a private sector network operator/investor by agreeing to act as an "anchor tenant" by signing up for a long-term service contract, thereby lowering the risk of the project, ensuring project financing, and wooing over a reluctant private sector partner. So far. Things are changing, and I would suggest it's time to take a second look at what such partnerships might entail. Fact is, there are many successful network operators out there that do not consider the public sector to be within their tightly focused field of vision. They have achieved success with wireless broadband precisely by avoiding the mess that Muni Wireless has become. So they eschew any involvement at all with "government." But consider what would be possible if these successful network operators opened themselves up to the possibility of supporting a field digital transition project in a neighboring community. They already have a network in operation, servicing private sector clients. They have already made the required investments. Odds are, they have slack capacity in backhaul bandwidth and local area coverage...they could help, if they chose to. This brief argues for a second look at how we define a Public Private Partnership, on both sides. Let's open our minds to the possibilities presented by this time of change. Public Demand for Access and Applications Successful broadband network operators with a history of focusing on private sector clients should take a second look and reconsider public sector broadband clients, given recent changes in an evolving market. And public sector organizations interested in digital transition and broadband access options should look to their immediate neighborhood for partners. Despite discredited business models that bring bad press, municipal interest in wireless broadband continues to grow, being driven by a growing awareness of the attractive economics of field digital transition and wireless broadband applications. Public sector entities are beginning to recognize wireless broadband applications and their supporting networks as a way to contain city operating budgets. Private sector-focused network operators should consider two principal areas to take advantage of this trend and provide new revenue with little added risk: 1) operating public sector-owned networks in exchange for access to bandwidth on those networks; or 2) providing public sector clients access services using privately-held networks already in place, augmenting the networks where necessary based on market opportunity. They should consider these select market segments: 1) cities sufficiently motivated to invest in network assets; 2) cities adjacent to private sector networks that may be extended to provide service to interested public sector clients; or 3) cities where these two trends converge: a city may invest in a partial network in order to leverage an adjacent private operation. Private Sector Success By and large, private sector firms that have been successful so far in leveraging 802.11 technologies and point-to-point wireless broadband strategies have opted not to pursue public sector business opportunities. Public Sector Failure The case for public involvement in wireless broadband networks remains to be made, and it hasn't been helped by the speculative quality and poor performance of early efforts ("Earthlink," "Free Wi Fi"). Those private providers that pursued public initiatives were undone by "bad" business models, high equipment costs, inadequate capabilities and poorly financed networks. Paradoxically, despite bad press and public failure, public managers are growing more interested in wireless networks, but no longer to serve the disadvantaged or to provide free services. Interest is now based on the potential cost savings found in wireless broadband applications, driven by the proliferation of Wi Fi client-side chip sets. For example, a recent survey of 33 cities in Orange County, CA, showed the following interest levels in wireless broadband applications among "currently deployed" or "planned" networks: While demand for such applications on the public side is rising, few if any successful operators with demonstrated skills in 802.11 or point-to-point networks with private sector clients have offered connectivity services to meet such growing demand for public sector-focused networks to provide the access needed for the municipal applications. The Best of Both Worlds: New Varieties of Public Private Partnerships Publicly-owned, privately-operated networks: A new business model is emerging where a city may choose to leverage access to advantageous long-term bond financing in order to optimize public control and benefit by owning the network. The lowest risk approach for cities that opt to invest in infrastructure will be to seek private sector partners as operators and to develop market opportunities based on low or no-cost access to excess wireless bandwidth. In a win/win scenario, the private operator would gain competitive market advantage without expending capital on network construction. Those private sector operators who currently enjoy success in private-sector operations are best positioned and the most experienced to take advantage of this trend. Extensions of privately-owned & operated networks: A private network operator may choose to leverage current assets by extending existing network operations to adjacent cities or towns, as an alternative to municipally-initiated green field projects, the current norm. Like Cablevision's plans to take advantage of existing wired network assets by extending their reach with 802.11 technology to service municipalities and their own customers with mobile broadband services, any private network operator has an opportunity to react to local demand for a municipal network, or pro-actively promote the same where it makes sense. Where a private network owner can extend current subscriber-focused network operations at low risk, the operator is able to more fully utilize current investments, whether in network bandwidth, backhaul injection facilities, pole attachment agreements, or network operating centers (NOCs). City departments seeking wireless broadband applications that sign long-term service contracts provide stable secondary revenue for operators whose primary revenue source remains private subscribers. The Bottom Line Local public sector wireless broadband opportunities complement private network operators' core business (subscriber or client-based revenue) by adding new revenue and spreading fixed costs over a wider base. Left unaddressed, the need for broadband connectivity and services to support digital transformation projects will likely be met by cities providing such services to themselves or bringing in new entry operators who see public private partnerships as attractive points of market entry.
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Posted on June 17, 2008 at 08:50 AM | Comments (0) Communities & Communications
We human beings really have it rough. We can't live without each other, but being in a society can be such a pain in the ass! So many of our problems stem from either the inability or unwillingness to communicate effectively with each other, or the difficulties we find in making our communities work equitably and functionally. The key to both age-old problems is improved communication and more effective communities by way of a digital transition and broadband communications networks. We need to all try to understand each other and get along better, because We Are Family... Common Roots Having something in common is the basis for all friendship; the connections we form with others are the basis of the society we create. From those connections we gain the experience we need to establish trust. From trust, we get the courage to accomplish things by working together, to share risks and reap greater rewards. Our joint actions involve bringing things together.
All those things we really enjoy in life, those things that make it all worthwhile, come from connecting with others and finding a way to live and work together. Having something in common is where it all begins. With that, we are a part of a greater whole, a part of a community. And as a group of individuals with a common bond, we must communicate. We communicate with more variety now than we used to; our need to communicate has in no way diminished, and we have more tools at our disposal. It's far easier now to pick up the phone and make a call, in fact, long distance is even beginning to fade away as a communications term. And then there's email. While we may send fewer letters, we actually end up writing much more often by using these new electronic media. An essential element for all this communication is "always on" broadband infrastructure. Broadband technology makes it ever easier to communicate and stay in touch, to form, build and keep communities. In a world where events and activities seem to conspire to pull us apart, broadband has become one of our most potent and vital tools. We'll never stop talking, never stop connecting. Our need to stay connected will not diminish. Broadband is but one more step in an evolutionary path to find easier, better, and cheaper means of staying in touch with our many communities. Local Community Support Communities must communicate internally and with the outside world and they rely on the dominant telecommunication providers (cable and telecom) to provide the broadband access service they need. In the absence of such traditional connectivity, communities must find a 'Plan B." But as corporate entities, the dominant ISPs believe that broadband is a corporate service that they choose to provide to markets for a profit. They believe that broadband should resemble their traditional service models, It is anathema to traditional ISPs for broadband communication to look like other access services delivered over local distribution networks that society has installed over the years (electricity, water, gas), regardless of any logical argument or community rationale. But there's no good reason broadband access projects should not be free to dip from both wells. They can use both approaches as models for services as well as infrastructure deployment. Broadband can be part of a service bundle (like from a cable or DSL provider), or it can be yet one more access service provided more like a utility (like electricity). And to ensure coverage to all markets in a timely fashion, communities are likely to employ such a utility approach in some areas to gain broadband access, and when they do, the effort will require local community support.
Building the trunk line, the core of any network, is not like building the local distribution networks out at the edges: the trunk lines serve everyone, so there's less risk of cost recovery when everyone pays in to the pot - there's a vested interest for all in seeing that these core networks get built. So at first, the core gets more attention. But when it comes to local distribution networks, nobody outside the local community cares that much, at least not nearly as much as the local population does. Locals have incentives - they experience infrastructure problems daily, while visitors suffer only a temporary inconvenience and then leave the area - and their problems - behind. Beyond the primetime NFL cities - in other words, "all the rest of us", building citywide networks out at the edge requires two critical elements: 1) local initiative and community support; and 2) some form of firm market security (often, a monopoly grant or long-term contract) to ensure both a broad base of revenue and the promise of long-term capital recovery. Without those two critical elements, towns are stuck with the status quo - the networks they currently have in place - or their new local distribution networks will only get built out in spots where cost recovery can be assured. That's why build-out of local Last Mile Broadband has been so slow - it depends on local community support, and lacking any cohesive national strategy to give that process direction, local politics remains a slow, stop-start business.
Distribution Networks It has ever been the case with distribution networks. Build-outs of other networks have shown two predominate paths: In contrast to these established services, broadband service is still very new, only a little more than ten years old. Largely, it is supplied over existing cable and telecom networks, and it has indeed proven to be a high-value service where it's been offered. The cable and telecom networks have taken us a long way in this first phase, adapting their existing networks to provide faster and faster access service, bundled with content or other services in most cases. Of course, current providers would continue under this model - to them, it ain't broke, so why fix it? And broadband service has proven very lucrative so far.
One thing, however, is certain. Given ten years of experience with broadband, we can now conclude that more creativity and local coordination will be needed if local broadband distribution networks are ever to be built out over large areas, or if they're ever to be built out anytime soon. Communities Take Control Despite recent set-backs with initial business models, today's digital transition initiatives merely follow in the footsteps of history, as local communities take the imitative to bring in a vital utility service. As broadband grows in importance, more local communities will grow impatient with existing telecom and cable providers and step up to exert more local control and create a sense of urgency. But it's a slow process. Wi Fi Mesh and WiMAX, the latest iterations of wireless broadband innovation, are so new that unanswered questions remain. Fiber networks have more proven value, but they're very expensive. Ultimately, local broadband network projects move forward with local community initiative and support from local governments, businesses and community leaders. Such leaders have two choices: 1) strike a political and economic accommodation with existing telecom and cable incumbents, cellular carriers, and/or successful new service providers; or 2) strike out on their own. Digital transition initiatives with broadband applications and wireless broadband networks provide a quick technology fix, but where they manage to take hold, expect at some point for the wireless phase to be followed and complemented with a fiber network phase for long-term sustainability. But regardless of the technology at the edge, it's still the politics that drive the solution in the end. When it comes to local distribution networks, the public and the private sector need each other. The most efficient solutions marry the respective advantages of public and private sector players and help offset disadvantages. All previous types of distribution networks offer lessons on where community digital transition and broadband network projects can go, if there is political will at the local level. And as leaders on both sides come to grips with this economic and political reality and gain some flexibility, we'll begin to see the pace of last mile digital transitions and broadband projects increase. While history gives us valuable lessons about economic and political constraints, the Internet has taught us a lot recently about emergence and bottom-up solutions. Either existing leaders will begin to catch on, try new approaches and get busy, or new solutions and new leaders will emerge to go around them - when it comes to broadband infrastructure, we must insist: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way!"
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Posted on June 15, 2008 at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) March to MobilityAt the TAGITM conference last week, a thought occurred to me. Cities spend so much time and money and energy focused on the IT shop inside their city buildings. They have desktops, servers, networks, telephones, storage, software - it's their Enterprise function, and the IT support crew was out in force to make sure their needs are met. Most of the vendors were there to address the needs of the cities as it pertains to their enterprise IT functions, inside the house. Yet we know by experience that about half of any municipal workforce spends at least some of their time on a regular basis out in the field, and many, most especially the public safety folks, spend most of their time in the field. Their needs are assumed to be met by radios and cell phones, perhaps some air cards. So the mission of Field Digital Transition is to take the Enterprise functionality out of the office and into the field, to make employees more functional and efficient when they are away from their office. IT departments spend most of their time and money trying to get more efficient inside the buildings, tweaking what are no doubt already pretty efficient operations. Here is the magic of this space: IT departments could start spending some of that money on their field applications to make their field employees more effective. And given the current rudimentary state of field mobile data access, it is likely that the first waves of investment would produce significant savings in the first couple of rounds. And that is because, as we know, we are increasingly mobile in our lives and on the job. We have come to expect to stay connected by voice wherever we are. I call it the March to Mobility, and its a relatively recent phenomenon when it comes to data communication (as in broadband).
The Roots of Mobility Radio was like magic two generations ago - it was the original "wireless." To understand the societal impact, you have only to chat with someone who is getting on in years and watch as they get a twinkle in their eyes recounting their first experience with radio. Motorola got its name and made its early fortune by putting the radio in the car, solving interference problems that hampered reception. As for mobile two-way communication, you had a nickel in your pocket and a pay phone on the nearest corner. If it was wireless two-way, then for a long time you were limited to bulky hand-held radios and walkie talkies, with advances spurred on by military research - remember those WWII jeep mounted radios and Korean War radio set back packs that weighed 80 pounds? Broadcast radio and two-way telecommunications weren't truly mobile until transistors freed them from the bulkiness of vacuum tubes 50 years ago, so we could take our music and voice communications with us on foot. While we came a long way with analog or non-digital radio systems, mobile telecommunications really only began to take off as the brief period of transistors were followed rapidly by integrated circuits on silicon chips. We haven't looked back since. Digitization and miniaturization enabled mobility to continue the trend of adding voice and data options, as well as more mobility, for less. Digital pagers were our early digital mobile devices, back in the Telecom Dark Ages (20 years ago!) when a cell phone was a car phone. Power sources had to keep up with communications capabilities. The Sony Walkman created a sensation when it took the cassette tape out of the stereo cabinet, out of the car dash, and put it in the hands of joggers, cyclers, and snow skiers. This was true mobility! While not a communication device per se, the Walkman gave a new generation a revolutionary new approach to mobile entertainment. At the original demonstration of the first car phone in the U.S. back in the 1980s, the car battery drained before they were able to demo the phone! More work needed to be done on power supply, one of many challenges to overcome. Soon, however, cell phones went on to become expensive appendages for the business professional. Two advances catapulted cellular phone adoption: the build out of the cellular tower network and the ATT Wireless national roaming plan (no more long distance fees on cell phones). Soon copied by competitors, national plans put pricing of cell phone service plans within the range of the mass market, and higher call quality with improved cell phone reception levels spurred cell phone adoption. Data Comes to Town But what about mobile data? The lowly pager, first to market with mobility, was marginalized to a niche service with the rise of cell phones. Pushing limited data in niche applications became the realm of pagers and mobile data, the RIM Blackberry surged in popularity, with combined data and voice capability in a compelling user interface. SMS text messaging over cellular networks remains narrow band, and necessarily so, because their networks were constructed with voice in mind, not broadband data. Cellular networks are undergoing extensive investment to enable third-generation network technologies that will enable broadband data capabilities. Until those advances are completed, though, current technology will limit the amount of data over cellular networks. The brief history of mobile data communications didn’t start in earnest until the advent of the World Wide Web began to bring the Internet to the masses, first with dial-up, and in the last several years with broadband. With wide-spread Internet access came the rise of e-mail as a popular form of data communication, perhaps the first internet killer app. When Intel began to pump out Centrino chips for laptops, and Wi Fi Hot Spots began to appear at Starbucks, the race for mobility was off again on a new and powerful tangent. Hot Spots and home networks could be called the payphones of the 21st Century. The need to find a restaurant or coffee shop to get on-line and check emails is eerily similar to the need to find a pay phone at a gas station or street corner to make a voice call 30 years ago. Now, the need to stay in touch via e-mail and voice mail messages is joined by the need to access social networking applications like facebook and MySpace while on the go. Wireless Broadband networks hold the promise to do for mobile data communications what the cell phones did for mobile voice communications. Along the way, we can expect voice and data to converge on one handheld device, which will require a broadband network over which to transmit the data. Incumbent telecom companies are busy with plans to build out their data networks with fiber to compete with cable, and cable has begun offering Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to compete with the telecom companies. As municipalities gain steam in building their new high capacity mobile data networks using wireless mesh technology, telecoms and cable companies are taking a second look at the potential of the new wireless broadband technologies that complement their strategic plans. The global telecommunications industry dwarfs most others, because human beings have to connect with other human beings, fulfilling a need almost as strong as the need for water and air. Cities are recognizing a need to be connected to the Internet and to keep their citizens plugged in to the Web on their own terms and in their own time frame. "Netbooks" like the Asus EEE hold great promise, bringing data and voice convergence from the laptop side, complete with Wi Fi access, Skype loaded on the desktop, and video capabilities. Modern Mobility Whatever the ultimate outcome, we can be assured that mobile solutions will continue to find a place together with fixed connectivity solutions. We can say with high certainty that more bandwidth will be valued in more ways over time. And we can see clearly that prices for these mobile, high bandwidth services will decline in time as well. In a way, culture and society from the adoption side have lagged wireless technology developments all along, from the development side. Culture and society tend to lag most any technological innovation. It takes a while for us slow humans to adapt to change, and we suffer from some kind of lag malaise when technology moves too fast - "future shock" was a term in vogue 30 years ago. But technology that moves along with us wherever we may go has always been welcome by the market, and it will always be welcome. So, the march to mobility goes on, and it drives the need for the enabling infrastructure. The challenge for private and public sector leaders is how to get this infrastructure built efficiently and economically. Private sector providers will build a network, but not necessarily a network that extends everywhere, not necessarily as soon as we would like, and certainly not in places where there is no potential for a profit. Public sector providers (cities and towns) become motivated when the private sector does not provide for them, and faced with the need to get networks installed, they have so far tended to partner with knowledgeable and experienced third party providers to ensure that they have networks that work. The vision of the March to Mobility described in this brief is about ubiquitous, mobile broadband access affordable for all, anywhere, anytime on a multitude of devices with variable content at the touch of the fingertip, at the whim of the user. Because of this history, we can easily envision being able to access voice and data wherever we are, indoors or outdoors. It's not a big leap, but it will happen much faster if more people take initiative to move things along. A wireless cloud will in time cover us all. The technologies that will support that wireless cloud will vary from place to place, and they will fade into the background in time. New and wonderful applications and devices will be used to access the network. The job of public sector leaders is to look out for their citizens and work with all parties to ensure an infrastructure that supports the March to Mobility and the many benefits to modern life it will bring. 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Posted on June 14, 2008 at 08:05 PM | Comments (0) The New Three Rs: Risk, Reward, and Resources
Sometimes I'm reminded of my days back in Jr. High, when the boys would stand on one side of the dance hall, checking out the girls on the other side of the dance hall, checking out them. Who would be first to take on the risk of rejection by asking another to dance? These days, city staff and officials, that is, those in the know, eye each other on their side of the public/private dance hall, checking out the vendors and their solutions, wondering who will go first to move into the 21st Century with a program of digital applications running on a broadband network, who will launch a digital transition. You can hear the thoughts, "It already looked risky before, when municipal wireless was brand new, then some cities jumped in and their networks failed. Now, it's not just perceived risk, but proven risk. Why even go down that path. Who needs it?" Problem is, over here on the private side, we feel like we've learned from the failures of the past, rejected the business models that led to failure in the first place, and devised an approach that has in fact, very low risk. But we will need some innovative cities to hear the message and get out there on the dance floor, or else we'll continue this stalemate and sit and tap our feet to the music, wondering what it would be like to be out there dancing. Perhaps this analysis of Risk, Reward, and Resources will help some city leaders to look at risk more analytically.
While some may argue that this discussion is only common sense, decisions on risk, reward, and resources are the lifeblood of a leader, a vital part of the job description. This brief is offered to bring these issues out into the open, hopefully leading to a better shared understanding of the drivers of executive decision-making when it comes to a Digital Transition project. Risk and Reward One of the biggest challenges any new idea, product or service faces is to overcome the resistance to change, which says, "The old way of doing things is 'safer.' " Idioms capture the conventional wisdom: "Better the devil you know (than the one you don't)" or "Look before you leap" or "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" or finally, the more modern, "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM." All these idioms share two commonly-held perceptions. First, that "Risk is bad." And second, that "The present is safe, while the future is dangerous." What they leave out is the connection between risk and reward, which is one of the most basic tenets of business. Low risk, low return. Higher risk, higher return. And sure enough, there are indeed also idioms to support the alternative view of moving ahead in the face of risk: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" and "He who hesitates is lost." This is an age old dilemma, with viewpoints on either side, so, unfortunately, conventional wisdom appears to offer little help. The key to sound decision-making then is to understand how risk and return work as a dynamic, find suitable balance to meet one's objectives, and make rational decisions based on resources and particular situations.
Fortunately, we've learned how to manage the risk of future outcomes to improve returns. Managing investment portfolios is a daily task of managing risk for better returns. Both "Risk Mitigation" and "Maximizing Return on Investment" share the same goal: to move outcomes from the upper right or lower left quadrant to the lower right. Minimizing risk (the chance of a bad outcome) or maximizing return (the chance of a good outcome) are like pairing a good defense with a good offense for a win. Resources A third variable, often given short shrift in assessing a risk decision, completes the equation: the amount of resources at risk is a factor in how much risk is tolerable: buying one lottery ticket vs. investing your whole paycheck in lottery tickets, for instance. Risk Mitigation Recognize. Step One in mitigating risk is to understand all possible negative outcomes, and then assess each for degree of risk and reward - what's the trade-off ratio? Plan. Step Two is to craft and prioritize strategies to minimize potential negative outcomes, and maximize potential positive outcomes. Manage. Step Three, often overlooked, is to execute on the strategies through controlled and prioritized activity. Risk Assessment Recognizing the inevitability of risk and accepting the need to take risks to gain rewards are two key steps every decision maker must master. In fact, one could argue that learning to take good risks is the key to good leadership. In assessing any situation, a leader must map risks in four ways: a) degree of risk; b) risk / reward ratio; c) resources at risk and d) type of risk. Degrees of Risk Not all risk is equal. The degree of risk speaks to the size of the potential negative outcome. It's important to assess this factor, because decisions are often subjective, based on the personality type of the leader. A conservative leader may give more weight to the downside, overvaluing risks and undervaluing rewards, while a more adventurous leader may have a tendency to do the opposite. An objective risk assessment will place a value on each risk - set boundaries around the possible outcomes and ascribe a value to "the worst that could happen" and "the least that could happen," a "worst case," "best case," and somewhere in the middle, a "most likely case." Risk can also be subdivided into categories, ranging from trivial risk, to healthy risk, to acceptable risk, to unavoidable risk, to risk that must be avoided at all costs. Trivial Risk. Encountered & dismissed. Trivial risk falls in the green box, healthy and acceptable risks fall in the beige box, unavoidable risks fall in the yellow, and catastrophic risk falls in the red box.
Risk/Reward Ratio In evaluating risk, it is helpful to add in the reward side of the equation to put the level of risk in perspective. One cannot be considered without the other. There is "absolute" risk, what would happen irrespective of circumstances, there is "relative" risk, how risks stack up against each other based on outcomes (see above), and there is "proportional" risk, which brings reward into the evaluation. Resources at Risk In evaluating risk, one must consider the amount at stake. When a small amount is ventured, the outcome is inconsequential. When one’s life is on the line, literally or figuratively, it is an altogether different assessment.
Types of Risk In any Digital Transition project evaluation, risk falls in five main areas, with the first three most subject to project team planning (financial, technological, and business). Financial. In the end, every business discussion can be boiled down to its financial aspects. Money is the universal language of business. Assessing a risk as to its financial impact is for many, the bottom line that matters most. Financial risks may include such issues as recovery of capital expense, management and recovery of operating expenses, and attainment of cost savings and revenue objectives. How these risks are addressed will determine how well the plan tracks to financial objectives in reality. Will we lose money? How much? Business risks may include such issues partner performance, market reactions, management of quality issues, balancing of budgets, management of expenses, etc. How will the parties manage this project together? Can they be trusted to do as they promised?
Legal. Any public entity must consider legal risks as it moves forward. Will we go to jail or be sued? Legal risks are mostly managed in the contract phase and by following the law and regulations, with guidance from attorneys and the legal department; in areas where public entities are involved, the choice is usually very clear cut - no legal risks allowed! Political. The word public implies that business will be conducted out in the open, making it subject to a higher degree of scrutiny and critique. Will I lose my next election if this fails? Political risks, on the other hand, are often the most pressing for elected officials and must be factored into the equation. They may have an over-ride impact over any other decisions or plans. The keys to successful risk mitigation are information and planning. Investing sufficient resources up front, before a project is underway is perhaps the best strategy for mitigating possible risks and ensuring project success. Gathering Requirements. Before undertaking any project, an organization should answer the Why question. Understanding the project goals before beginning any other activities is perhaps one of the wisest ways to start a project. Ensuring that the goals are in alignment with the organizations values is an important complement. Setting Priorities. A good project plan will establish boundaries and set priorities, so that the leaders can ensure that no matter what else happens, their core objectives are accomplished. By setting priorities in a well-organized plan, with provisions for project management, the team manages unknown risks by being prepared to make good decisions. Selecting a Partner or Vendor. Working with outside parties is often one of the biggest risks an organization can face, but such partnering is a key risk mitigation strategy as well. This duality makes this step one of the most critical. It starts with a thorough assessment of the pool of potential partners, followed by a process of evaluation using both objective and subjective criteria A solid Procurement Process provides the most competitive alternatives and best value to meet the project objectives. First, the team should evaluate the simplest procurement methods. For instance, if any of the necessary components for the project are available through a public catalogue or off of an interlocal agreement with another public entity, or through any other non-bid method, the team may choose that option if it is acceptable, as it may save considerable resources (time and/or money). Or, the team may pursue one of two bid options: Financial Prudence. In general, the project that pays the least for the most quality and the best fit ensures the best value and lowest financial risk. Public entities often place much emphasis on competitive bidding, indeed, are required by law to do so, but too little emphasis on opportunity cost and the gain from partnering or aligning with other public entities for a group purchase. Paying the lowest price is one strategy, but quality should not be sacrificed. Having an option to pay over a long period allows payments to be minimal, but also offers the alternative of an early payoff, for less project risk. Technology Selection. With thorough evaluation of project requirements and user preferences, a technology selection is far more likely to be a good fit over the long run. The second risk element to mitigate is to ensure against technological obsolescence, which is best ensured by vendor stability and system design, where modularity allows the technology to adapt over changes in the environment and industry. Other strategies include a preference for standards-based over non-standard, and open systems over closed. Business Management. During the contract phase, a public entity can ensure the lowest risk by a thorough accounting for all contingencies in the Terms and Conditions, and through a detailed Statement of Work. Contractual provisions abound, ranging from insurance, warranties, and bonding, to non-liability and confidentiality. Joint management and oversight, dispute resolution, mediation, and arbitration provide for sound operations and bumps along the road. In general, good contracting is about mutual obligations and a solid give-for-get attitude among the parties. Some issues can be managed in a contract, but the rest must be based on generation of trust mechanisms in the partnership and a shared obligation to make things work for both parties, also known as a win-win attitude/approach. Risk, reward, and resources come together through sound planning, a goal of balancing based on community priorities, values, and objectives; and an objective consideration of timing and the need to move forward and remain competitive while avoiding unnecessary risk. Risk itself is unavoidable; not bad per se, but manageable and necessary for growth to occur. ATTRIBUTION REQUIREMENT - The reader is encouraged to link to this post and to share this material, with the understanding that they provide an attribution to MetroNetIQ and share any alterations with MetroNetIQ.
Posted on June 14, 2008 at 10:26 AM | Comments (0) Wi Fi Mesh Economics: CostsA key conclusion I draw from last weeks activities is that the complexities in Wireless Broadband challenge the decision making process for city staff and elected officials. Four ways of dealing with overwhelming complexity (not an exhaustive list, but a sample) 1. Break the problem and solution set down into smaller pieces so that one may move forward - call this one the Chew On It strategy - Break Down into Bite Size Pieces. 2. Present the rational but complex story to the decision makers and appeal to their rational right brains for a decision "on the numbers," call this one the Let the Numbers Sell Themselves 3. Stress the wonderful developments in technology - call this one the Wow 'Em with Wonder 4. Kick the problem down the road for someone else to deal with - call this one the Throw Up Your Arms strategy - "It's too complex - I can't deal with it." Unfortunately, too many product-oriented types have promoted wireless broadband projects based on #2 or #3, and way too many decision makers are opting for #4 in the face of the complexities presented by a strategic decision regarding wireless broadband, using recent bad news of pioneer project failures as an excuse not to go forward. I recommend #1, and here's why. With a little effort to get educated, the benefits become understandable and they truly are immense, if broken down into bite size pieces for understanding and decision-making and ultimately, for project management. To steer clear of a network-based solution and maintain the status quo of point solutions is to settle for the short-term easy and mundane, and to pass up the longer-term somewhat more challenging but compelling alternative. That's why I do what I do on this website, which can be described as chewing on things to make them make sense. As for Wi Fi Mesh Economics, a topic that bedevils so many, I've taken a stab at breaking a Mesh Network Project down into its key cost components to provide a better understanding of a potential project, and provided a rough estimating tool at the conclusion. The intent is to inject some reality into discussions. Check it out. The Bottom Line on Wi Fi Mesh After departmental assessments show how and why each department would use a wireless mesh network, it becomes time for an organization that contemplates a digital transformation with a network project to perform a conservative financial analysis. When that analysis shows a positive return on investment (ROI) in a reasonable amount of time, the public entity can safely conclude that the investment is prudent. But just what are all the details that impact such an ROI analysis? This briefing document details the component costs a public entity should expect in building out a Wi Fi Mesh network, one half of the ROI equation (revenue from the network constitutes the other side, to be addressed in a different brief). In summary, a rule of thumb in Wi Fi Mesh Economics is as follows: when making cost estimations, Wi Fi Mesh networks will require approximately $150,000 per square mile in one-time costs and approximately $10,000 per square mile in annual operating costs. These estimates increase on a per square mile basis as networks are smaller and more difficult to deploy / operate. They decrease on a per square mile basis as networks are larger and easier to deploy / operate. The table at the conclusion of this brief provides a cost-summary analysis on a 10-square mile basis, as well as on a one-square mile basis. Preliminary Studies and Assessments Before contemplating installation of a wireless mesh network, a public entity should conduct individual departmental assessments for two reasons. First, assessments provide the qualitative information down to the departmental management level on both the potential business process improvements that arise when a wireless mesh network is deployed, and to socialize the potential cultural changes to the organization - these changes are wide-ranging and any organization needs time to absorb and contemplate the impact that a network will have.
Second, assessments provide the quantitative data that will go into any ROI analysis, ranging from business process improvements that change labor inputs to the need to purchase new applications and end user equipment and transition from old processes in order to achieve potential efficiencies. Potential Cost: A consultant is recommended for such activities, with an estimate of $12,500 - $50,000 (approximately 100 - 400 man/hours at $125/hr.) Summary of Network Component Costs A wireless mesh network is a large version of a local area network, or LAN, sometimes referred to as a Metropolitan Area Network, or MAN. In contrast, a cellular telephone network is referred to as a Wide Area Network, or WAN. The wireless mesh network provides wireless connectivity to end users throughout a large area, which in telecommunications jargon is referred to as a Last-Mile Network to indicate that it makes the connection of the last-mile, from the larger network down to the individual households and businesses. Recently, consumer advocates have started referring to this type of network as a First-Mile Network, looked at more from the perspective of the end-user. Either way, the nature of the wireless mesh network is to create an interface between multiple users at the end points, and a larger body of other users via the public Internet (often depicted in diagrams as a cloud, as seen in the diagram below). In between the Last-Mile (or, First-Mile) and the Internet is the Middle-Mile segment, sometimes also referred to as the backbone. The backbone, which can be either wired or wireless, serves to "Inject" bandwidth into the mesh network at points that are alternately called "injection points," "backhaul points," or "gateway nodes." The diagram below graphically depicts the three components of Internet, Middle Mile, and Last Mile. While some organizations may choose to go forward with a deployment without a detailed network design, it is highly recommended that this stage be completed. It is important to design a network based on detailed real-time information. A detailed network design will be based on a detailed site visit, with examination of pole mounting sites, confirmation of available power, orientation of line-of-sight issues, etc. The work product of a detailed network design is a site map and deployment strategy document that provides the deployment team the detailed information they need for a rapid and successful deployment process. Potential Cost: This stage is highly dependent on the nature of the proposed coverage area and the difficulties that may be encountered during the design process, with an estimate of $10,000 - $150,000. Network Equipment MetroNetIQ recommends a multi-radio Wi Fi Mesh access point capable of both 2.4 GHz and 4.9 GHz spectrum operations. Typically this equipment features radio boards mounted internally in a NEMA-rated enclosure, with back-up power supply and mounting brackets. Third party equipment such as cabling and antennae will be needed as well. Coverage recommendations are between 25 and 35 access points per square mile (average over the entire coverage area), depending on the terrain, street design, tree foliage, building densities, etc. The price for each access point will depend upon the brand selected, the negotiation leverage applied, the volume of purchase, and the complexity and quality of the access point. Network Operations Center (NOC) A network operations center or NOC is a vital piece of the installed network: its brains, so to speak. NOC components include servers, monitoring stations, a room to house that equipment, and the labor to provide the oversight of operations. Potential Cost: The potential cost of the NOC depends on how the costs are divided (Will a pre-existing NOC be used to provide the oversight, with a portion of the costs being borne by the new network? Is an altogether new NOC required? Are there opportunities for the city or county to provide free office space to house the equipment, etc.?) Estimates of the NOC cost can thus range from $100,000 to over $300,000 if all costs are added in. Placement of access points in a network design is critical to the ultimate effectiveness of the network. In a perfect world, every streetlight or distribution pole chosen is ready for mounting, with no additional cost to make them ready. Unfortunately, that is seldom the case. For instance, a streetlight that is powered with a photo-optic sensor device, as many are, is inappropriate for mounting, as it lacks power during daylight. If vital to the network design, that particular pole would need to be rewired for constant power. In another case, a distribution pole (electricity only) may be in an ideal location, but to be suitable for mounting, it would need to be refitted with a transformer that would provide power at the appropriate voltage level and outfitted with some means for mounting the access point. Mounting Assets II - Pole Attachment Fees Network equipment can be mounted on any structure that enables the boxes to be placed about 20 feet off the ground, but the preferred mounting structure is a street light in most instances, given the combination of height, power availability, and multiple mounting options. Alternatives include traffic lights, electricity distribution poles, roof tops, and water towers. This particular aspect can be one of the most troublesome for a wireless network, especially if the owner of the mounting assets is not cooperative, motivated, or prepared, which can result in significant project delays and added costs. When electric utility assets are used, a "pole attachment agreement" - a contract to lease space on the structure for mounting equipment - is necessary. Potential Cost: The cost for mounting assets will depend on the owner of the assets and the stated price for mounting, which can vary widely. At this early stage in industry development, one additional cost can be delays in a project that result when a utility lacks a policy, or has only an immature policy, and details must be determined. In other cases, a fee is assigned, but it can vary from as low as $2/pole/month to $500/pole/month. A good average for estimating purposes would be $10/pole/month. Electric Power The good news is that wireless access points do not require significant amounts of power, about 20 watts, or about 20 kWhs/month - about as much as a cable TV set-top box (not much). The power consumption is so low that it makes little sense to meter the power consumption of these units, rather, it makes more sense to set a standard rate and meter a single device to track usage, perhaps providing a true-up if the unmetered rate proves off-base. Potential Cost: The typical power cost for an access point for estimation purposes is about $2/device/month. Deployment Deployment involves several steps, and considerable expense, as the equipment arrives from the manufacturer in boxes and must go through several stages before it is even ready to be mounted, after which it must be installed on the poles. Once equipment is mounted, the system must be assessed for performance and adjustments made before the deployment is considered complete and the network can be tested and "accepted." Staging and Configuration see the equipment assembled from piece parts into integrated mountable units. Two-man crews using bucket trucks perform a relatively simple mounting exercise when the pole is ready, but considerable work may be needed on some poles to enable mounting. Typically, two-man crews can mount a unit in as little as 30 minutes, but a problem pole can take a day or more to complete. Potential Cost: While staging and configuration and simple deployments can cost as little as $200/access point, a fully loaded cost for a network deployment, including problem cases, is more accurately estimated at $1200/access point. Wireless mesh networks provide a signal that is readily available to end users in the open air, but the signal may have difficulty penetrating walls and be less available to receivers indoors. For that reason, a booster device may need to be placed in the window to receive a signal or to transmit signals to and from the network. Such devices are referred to as consumer premise equipment or CPE. These devices are needed primarily for end users in indoor environments, and the cost may be borne by the end user, the network operator, or some combination thereof. In some cases, a governmental user may choose to use a mobile booster for a vehicle mounted in the trunk or on the truck. Bandwidth Bandwidth in an information network is a somewhat abstract concept, but it can be equated with current in an electric or water network or traffic flow on a highway. Bandwidth is the provisioning of information throughput capacity to serve a network. Bandwidth is provided by purchasing such capacity at Megabits/second (Mbs) - millions of bits of data/second - from a wholesale provider. All wireless networks require backhaul capacity - connection to the Internet - but a wireless mesh network differs from a Hot Spot because the mesh network can share a backhaul connection among several access points, while the Hot Spot has a one-to-one relationship between access point and backhaul. A mesh network that uses IEEE 802.11g (Wi Fi) has a theoretical local capacity of 54 Mbs, but practical capacity delivered to end users in a mesh network will range from 1 to 15 Mbs (up and down), depending on local conditions and management protocols. To optimize the use of this local area capacity, bandwidth must be injected at various points inside the mesh. To be able to leverage the full communications capacity of the wireless access nodes and provide the signal quality needed for high-bandwidth applications like voice over IP and video, the network will need a minimum of 100 Mbs bandwidth to be injected at regularly spaced intervals, and this need should be considered dynamic - bandwidth injection will need to be managed to meet demand on the mesh network as it grows over time. Potential Cost: A good estimate for bandwidth injection is at least one injection point for each mesh segment of between 20 and 80 access points, depending on the effective ability of the mesh network to transfer backhaul capacity between its access points in the mesh. For cost estimation: using one injection point every two square miles, at market rates, the cost will depend on the local cost of bandwidth, which can range widely from market to market, between $100/mo and $1000/mo for a 100 Mbs connection. Operating Expense (including Network Monitoring & Maintenance) Operating expenses are dependent on the nature of the operation. At a minimum, either public sector or private market operations will require monitoring the performance of the wireless mesh network, providing basic maintenance and repair when physical breakdowns occur, providing upgrades to the network as needed, and providing customer support in the form of website maintenance and a phone call-in capacity (i.e., Help Desk) for technical support. A network that is used not only for supporting public sector needs, but also for providing services to a wholesale and retail market will require significantly more operating expense - in that case, operating expense resembles that of a telecommunications company. Potential Cost: A cost estimate for annual Operating Expense will depend upon the size of the network, but it should range from a minimum of $60,000 ($5,000/month) for basic services for a small network with shared facilities to as high as $1,000,000 for a substantial full-market operation of a mid-sized network. Applications The number and variety of applications to be used on a wireless broadband network is limited only by the imagination of the marketplace and the ability of companies to meet the perceived need as awareness of the versatility of a broadband-based platform grows. Driving the growth of wireless broadband applications are two principal factors: 1) the need for broadband users to find efficiencies and cut costs; and 2) the declining costs of Wi Fi client chips - as the price drops with growing production volumes, it makes economic sense to make more and more electronic devices 'Wi Fi compatible" by adding Wi Fi capability. The benefits of a Wi Fi Mesh network do not stop with a Wi Fi laptop that extends office functionality beyond the traditional fixed connection boundaries of a corporate network or the cable and telecom ISP, although such mobile data access is a huge improvement and a vital component of the value equation. In the end, Wi Fi technology offers more versatility to devices and enables applications that did not make sense without the ubiquitous network that a Wi Fi Mesh solution brings. Public sector application options provide a variety of cost savings that can be used to provide the financial justification to invest in a Wi Fi Mesh network: - Dual use smart phones that can choose the most efficient network to lower telecom costs Private market / consumer & business application options provide a variety of revenue generation opportunities that enhance the financial justification to invest in a Wi Fi Mesh network: - Dual use smart phones that can choose the most efficient network to lower telecom costs Potential Cost: A cost estimate for wireless broadband applications is widely variable, and will depend on the actual solutions chosen and vendor provisioning and pricing. Application costing should be developed separately to provide a key component of the ROI calculation for any network project plan. The chart below provides general information on networks, estimated expenses, and coverage.
Posted on June 14, 2008 at 06:37 AM | Comments (0) The Lowest Risk Publicly-Owned Network: The Case for Public OwnershipIn San Antonio, most people I talked with assumed that Municipal Wireless was dead. RIP. It's amazing how the brand had faded. So, I thought, why argue. In fact, my credo is more regional (Metropolitan) and independent of technology (Broadband), so it gives me a little liberty to agree and then stress the things you can do with the new technologies. It's about applications, and I got no argument in San Antonio this week. The clear focus is on two principal areas: Public Safety (Police Department) and Utilities (Automatic Meter Infrastructure or AMI). One thing that is compelling is that when one focuses on applications like Public Safety and Utilities, one quickly totes up a list of benefits that more than compensates for the price of the supporting network and applications. Thus, we get to the next in our series of executive briefs, this one focused on Publicly Owned Networks. More after you click through! The case for public ownership of a wireless broadband network lies in these six areas. Invalid Private Sector Solutions. Private sector solutions have mostly proven invalid to date - the industry remains immature and public sector entities have not had success in finding reliable partners that have adequate financing, experience, risk tolerance or motivation to invest the needed capital for a reliable network and still provide the service to the public sector at an acceptable rate (i.e., the pool of private sector owners is inadequate and their service offers have been largely unattractive). Network Strategic Plan Given these circumstances, a network strategic plan begins with a goal to optimize public control and benefit by owning the network. But that doesn't leave the private sector completely out of the picture. The lowest risk venture will bring in private sector partners in a Public Private Partnership through a solid Procurement Process that provides the most competitive alternatives / best value. If any of the necessary components are available through a public catalog or off of an inter-local agreement, or any other non-bid method, those options should be evaluated against two bid options: Following a vendor selection process and negotiations to arrive at the best price and solution, the remaining strategy component is a focus on cash flow, rather than capital expense, when considering network infrastructure cost recovery. Long-term financing takes advantage of an option available to public sector entities, but also shifts the emphasis on financing to an operations budget. We recommend a long term, 7-8 years, to align the annual network financing goal with anticipated annual cost savings. Network Cost Recovery A strategy to align annual network payments with annual operational budget savings, provides management with an annual savings target. Budgeted cost recovery is the most conservative approach: it focuses full cost recovery where public management is in complete control.
An added benefit of public ownership is excess capacity: public uses of the network bandwidth can be expected to range between 5 and 25% of network capacity, depending on the amount of high-bandwidth applications like video. The first step in a budget approach is to identify potential savings in operations and then set annual departmental targets, with the total meeting or exceeding the annual network capital expense. Savings from network operations fall into two categories: Managers should develop prioritized departmental assessments & strategies: When the network project is structured in this manner, the focus is on annual and sustaining efficiencies through integrating departmental wireless network applications for departmental budget savings. The management goal is to recover network costs through tighter management, using annual goals to meet or beat annual network cost targets based on departmental challenges. Surplus savings can be used to finance additional applications or end-user equipment, or to pay off the network asset in advance of original project goals, providing added efficiencies and/or less project risk. Managed correctly, this process should produce a long-term, sustainable, virtuous cycle of benefits and efficiencies that releases operational budget savings for continuous improvement. Full Use of Network Asset The primary plan for network capital cost recovery through operational budget efficiencies, Plan A, produces excess bandwidth after government needs have been met. Plan B for cost recovery is available by leveraging the excess bandwidth capacity after government needs have been met. Such a Revenue Enhancement Option affords the public entity an alternative plan not only to support a back-up network cost recovery strategy, but also to provide a new resource for community needs.
This network resource can be leveraged in a variety of ways, but it's important to note that unlike most revenue options available to the public sector, it does not involve a tax. Sales of excess bandwidth provide a non-tax resource, best achieved through offering a portfolio of wholesale and retail access service offers. To provide the most benefit to the taxpayers and the community, the public network owner’s ultimate goal should be to achieve full capacity utilization. As with other resources with finite capacity, any slack capacity can be priced at marginal rates to optimize potential revenue. The focus of this review so far has been on recovery of network capital costs, with no mention of the operating costs necessary to provide services and network maintenance. Because the wireless broadband network constitutes a natural monopoly, at least for the short-term, it provides an attractive resource that the public network owner can trade to an interested potential partner for low or no-cost services. The lowest risk path is to recruit a private partner to operate and maintain the network in exchange for a long-term lease to use the excess bandwidth to make a business. Additionally, a deal may be struck with that partner to share any revenue generated from using the network in exchange for taking responsibility for operating expenses, offsetting further risk. Besides the public network owner itself, potential alternate anchor tenants include: Network capacity optimization is most likely with a strategy to pursue local stakeholders, most notably incumbent Internet Service Providers, which currently lack such a metropolitan area mobile wireless broadband resource. Further, new Internet Service Providers, those most likely to pursue niche strategies by buying small amounts of network capacity without the need to make a large capital investment or to win a public bid, bring new competition to the local market. And in conclusion MetroNetIQ believes that public entities are in an enviable position when it comes to taking advantage of new communication technologies and applications. The strategy outlined in this brief is the lowest-risk, highest-return means for a public entity to leverage its unique position in the marketplace and improve the long-term social and economic prospects of its community by bringing in a new communications infrastructure resource. The Bottom Line By owning the network and operating it as a public infrastructure whose principal goal is to benefit the community and all its stakeholders, the public entity can take much of the risk off the table, open up new opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable and provide a winning solution that benefits the entire community in a sustaining manner. ATTRIBUTION REQUIREMENT - The reader is encouraged to link to this post and to share this material, with the understanding that they provide an attribution to MetroNetIQ and share any alterations with MetroNetIQ.
Posted on June 13, 2008 at 09:51 PM | Comments (0) Utility Field Digital TransitionAs I continue to process conversations from this week, another thing that jumps out at me is the concept of living in a constrained environment. I wrote a post earlier this week titled The Clouds on the Horizon are Chickens Coming Home to Roost that really summed it up, but I believe that its going to take some time for this message to sink in here in America. We've had it quite good for quite some time, to the point where we've come to accept as normal a lifestyle that wastes resources. 1. Resources. We're moving from a period of abundant resources to one where our behavior is constrained by economics and shortages - reality is, we have to do things differently. Here's the brief I wrote about Utilities and Broadband. Transforming Networks Wireless Broadband holds the promise of bringing ubiquitous high-speed Internet access and mobility to cities and their utilities, providing citizens universal access and governments lower cost services and increased security. It is no surprise that the potential for broadband has been compared to the wave of excitement that swept over the land when electricity came to cities one hundred years ago. Just as we now recognize electricity as a foundation of our digital economy, it's not hard to envision broadband networks becoming a new foundation for a digital transition that will change the way we do business and live our lives. Building a National Network At the start of the last century, finding the capital needed to bring electricity to communities was a huge challenge: it wasn't just the construction of power plants, but also the electricity transmission and distribution networks that would extend for miles to reach homes and businesses in neighborhoods to deliver the excited electrons. Large holding companies raised the vast amounts of capital needed to build investor owned utilities (IOUs) for the larger and more populated urban markets. Smaller municipalities that weren't able to raise sufficient IOU interest created their own electricity production and distribution systems with municipally-owned utilities (MOUs). Rural communities waited for years to get electricity, even as their urban cousins began to take for granted the modern creature comforts made possible by electricity. Finally they formed electricity cooperatives with help from the federal government. Fast forward one hundred years and municipalities and MOUs that decide to build their own broadband networks rather than wait to have their needs met over time by incumbent providers merely reflect an approach ratified by history long ago. Metropolitan broadband pioneers today have an advantage over their predecessors though: the historic electricity model as a guide. While any electric utility may choose to deploy a metropolitan broadband network, many still resist, sensing a departure from their core business of supplying power. But there's a different perspective to consider, so read on. A Natural Alliance Electric utilities and municipalities have a long history of working in unison to bring benefits to the communities they serve. Larger IOUs work with municipalities throughout their service territories, supporting economic development activities as a means to retain and grow their revenues. Similarly, the smaller but more numerous MOUs serve a valuable economic development role when they transfer payments to city government budgets to support city operations and keep taxes low. As municipalities consider wireless broadband networks, power supply and mounting rights are critical to successful network designs, and a lack of either can stall a network plan. It is natural for electric utilities and municipalities to act more proactively, under their traditional economic development banner, to deploy networks that offer mutual advantages. Such a city/utility team, working together with third party service providers, represents the best deployment scenario imaginable for communities that lack broadband access from traditional providers, that desire to help their underserved, or that seek greater business efficiencies & economic development opportunities. While early fiber municipal networks tended to focus on digital divide issues, bringing telephony, ISP, and video services to smaller communities that had few options, the next wave of wireless broadband municipal networks has been more focused on mobility applications for public safety and public services. Most often working with a private sector partner, cities find they have a win/win when they mitigate risk for partners by serving as anchor tenants for network services. Electric utilities can also act as anchor tenants, using broadband applications to provide themselves an array of services to achieve operational savings for utility managers (see insets).
The relative novelty of some digital broadband applications and supporting network technology makes this a very fresh approach for electric utilities, but early movers have already started deploying solutions to leverage wireless digital broadband applications & networks. The remainder of this brief explores the connection between electricity and telecommunications and the growing need utilities have for such a digital transition to broadband infrastructure. When utilities focus on their own digital transition to broadband, their initiative is a catalyst for other municipal departments and communities to realize the potential of their own digital transition. Bringing Two Essential Networks Together What does electricity have to do with communications infrastructure? Electric utilities have invested a tremendous amount in fiber optic capacity over the past two decades because complexity demands that managers operating distributed power grids have access to detailed real-time, technical information, such as the status of voltage levels, power quality measurements, etc. Utilities use such communications infrastructure to bring data from sensors in their networks back to their control centers, where that data helps them keep voltage levels balanced and power flowing. But increasingly, current infrastructure is perceived as inadequate to meet the management requirements of tomorrow. The Electricity Supply Chain The traditional electricity supply chain features: 1) electricity generation from turbines powered by steam produced by water heated by burning coal or gas, or through nuclear activity; and to a much lesser degree, water, not to mention the growing but still small wind, solar or biomass; 2) electricity transmission over long-distances at high voltage levels; 3) electricity distribution in local areas at lower voltages; 4) wholesale energy operations and 5) retail energy operations including metering, billing, and customer service. This traditional supply chain is evolving to include alternative distributed generation sources, enhanced transmission and distribution grids, and competitive retail services. A new, expanded supply chain brings with it new demands on the supporting communications infrastructure.
The Electricity Grid GridWorks, a program activity in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE’s) Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, aims to improve the reliability of the electric system through the modernization of key grid components. As described by the DOE, the nation’s power grid is comprised of interconnected, independently-owned transmission/distribution grids, operated by regional Independent System Operators, with North America divided into a Western grid, an Eastern grid, and a Texas grid, known as “ERCOT.” As stated above, individual electric utility grids are managed locally with utility-owned telecommunications networks that provide data to support the control and monitoring functions of grid management. Control centers maintain constant voltage levels by balancing generation (supply) to match load (demand). Coordinated demand side management (“DSM” – also known as “demand response”) allows utility managers to forgo running expensive peak generation during peak consumption periods by getting consumers to consume less, but without two-way communication with customers, DSM remains an unrealized goal, although DSM is gaining new attention recently.
A Grid at Risk In this land of plenty, we don't tend to notice our bounty of electricity until it is threatened or stops flowing altogether. Electricity, or the lack thereof, certainly becomes the primary topic of conversation during a blackout. Since the power shortages in California in the late 1990s and the Northeast blackout in 2003, the reliability of the nation’s electricity grid has been under increasing scrutiny. Years of under-investment have left our national grid increasingly inadequate to provide sufficient capacity to meet the growing need for high-quality power for digital customers, and at increased risk of catastrophic failure, like severe outages or blackouts. Regional infrastructure inadequacies are highlighted by location of renewable resources such as wind towers in remote locations, where they require transmission capacity to transfer the renewable power, much in demand, to populated areas. Demand Increases, Capacity Falls Regulatory uncertainty has been cited as a key reason for the failure of investment in transmission and distribution infrastructure to keep up with demand growth (projections in load growth by 2010 are 20%, compared to a 5% projected growth in transmission and distribution capacity during the same time period, leaving a shortfall of 15% to compound current short-comings). Government and research groups (i.e, DOE, FERC, NERC, EPRI, CEIDS) have begun to raise awareness in the electric utility industry about a U.S. power grid increasingly vulnerable to periodic and expensive disruptions, even including terrorist threats, and the impetus to act to address the situation is gradually emerging. Utilities Under Pressure Amid a growing awareness of the grid's vulnerability and the need for industry reform, electric utilities are squeezed by a number of market forces and face a sea change in the architecture and operational processes that drive their industry. First, traditional utility equipment and technology are growing more antiquated, providing less control for managers in an industry where operational control is mission critical. Second, traditional monitoring methods (limited SCADA augmented with physical inspection) are becoming too expensive and provide insufficient information. Third, reactive maintenance of aging infrastructure is increasingly expensive and provides unpredictable reliability. Fourth, regulatory priorities have migrated from cost-plus ratemaking to integrated resource planning to free markets to their current focus on enhanced security and reliability requirements. Finally, supply agreements pass along costs to distribution utilities that lack any control over their demand side, and demand spikes cause uncontrollable increases in the cost of power.
A variety of electric utility programs enhance reliability and better manage the transmission and distribution grids (SCADA, AMR, etc.), enable new sources of electricity ("green power," solar, wind, etc.) and promote conservation and efficient energy use among end users (Demand Response, Demand Side Management, etc.). In most utilities, these programs are delivered by separate departments and when they need communications infrastructure, it is provided independently. A utility communications infrastructure upgrade provides a common shared broadband network to the benefit of all such programs. By overlaying a ubiquitous information communication network on the power distribution network, an “energy internet” not only constitutes the foundation of a more reliable and functional power distribution system, but also enables a revolutionary new communications link between the utility and its customers, between the municipality and its citizens. A "Smart Grid" Transforms the Utility Advanced technologies are the path to improve a national electric system whose engineering design is over 50 years old according to EPRI, which sees digital automation as the "heart" of a "smart digital system" whose foundation is modern communication architecture. Development and integration of distributed energy resources and storage capabilities are key elements, with additional power electronics-based controllers & market tools. But any revitalization of the electric utility starts with a modern communication architecture.
A New Day Dawns Utility communications infrastructure initiatives can be roughly divided into two types: 1) smaller utilities, which more often use communications infrastructure to offer comprehensive services (Cable TV, voice telephony, broadband ISP); and 2) larger utilities that tend to focus on utility efficiency benefits, and then enjoy enhanced communications capabilities that can also be used to provide broadband access and/or to lease to third party service providers. Many projects begin by optimizing core utility activities (e.g., SCADA, meter reading), and then use any surplus communications infrastructure for other services (telecom, broadband access, cable TV). Most 20th Century projects were based on fiber optic networks, and many are well established. Pioneer utility communication projects (Burbank, Provo, Tacoma) were all wired, using hybrid fiber/coaxial cable (HFC) and fiber optic lines. Newer projects reflect newer technologies, integrating fiber-optic trunks with different wireless technologies (Sun Prairie, Alexandria, Braintree, Owensboro, Rochelle). Wireless technology for metropolitan area networks is a rapidly developing field, as new projects increasingly use newer wireless broadband technologies like Wi Fi Mesh (802.11a, g, n) and WiMAX (802.16d, e). (e.g., Corpus Christi, TX). By leveraging their unrecognized advantages as communications providers to meet their critical business needs, electric utilities can create a converged infrastructure and services business that provides ubiquitous wireless digital information to revolutionize not only their own utility operations, but how cities and citizens interact. Wireless Broadband can serve not only to upgrade grids for better reliability and enhanced energy services, but also to realize the latent broadband communications potential of existing power networks. The Path to Synergy Digital transition to wireless broadband applications running on metropolitan networks represents an attractive solution to the critical business issues and pains facing an electric utility, and municipalities face a unique opportunity to align with their community's trusted monopoly infrastructure company - the electric company - to explore network-based solutions to their own business problems. By working together, the utility and the municipality discover a lower risk, less expensive, more rapid road to a ubiquitous digital transition that will not only lower their costs and improve their services, but also bring to ratepayers and citizens new digital-based services and an improved quality of life. As a municipality examines its prospects for bringing broadband to its community, this analysis would point that municipality to their local electric utility as Step One: its best natural ally in the long road ahead. ATTRIBUTION REQUIREMENT - The reader is encouraged to link to this post and to share this material, with the understanding that they provide an attribution to MetroNetIQ and share any alterations with MetroNetIQ.
Posted on June 13, 2008 at 06:49 AM | Comments (0) Public Safety Digital Transformation: "To Protect and Serve"There were several noteworthy trends in my conversations the last two days in San Antonio at the Texas Association of Government IT Managers (TAGITM) 30th Anniversary Conference. 1. Municipal Wireless is Dead - more on this later - but seriously folks, that brand is in the trash nowadays. Text of the second document, after the jump.
The nature of maintaining public safety is to maintain a visible presence by putting highly mobile patrol officers out in the field. Ready access to data is increasingly vital to allow patrol officers to do their best in their difficult and dangerous task to protect and serve. Public Safety: The Key to Better Government & Society Primary Cost Drivers. In any Police Department, the key cost drivers of the budget are labor costs for patrol officers and operations costs for patrol vehicles and ancillary equipment. Both of these cost categories are inflationary, rising over time; the challenge cities face is to maintain a high level of public safety and not go broke doing so. Unrecoverable Administrative Time. Police department budgets suffer a process inefficiency: "unrecoverable administrative time" of as much as 30 minutes per hour of the patrol officer's typical day, which opens the door for savings. Simply put, much of the patrol officer's time is spent waiting, driving from one place to another and documenting activity in written reports. Vehicle Costs. The costs to own and operate a police cruiser are being driven up by the rising cost of gasoline. Better Public Safety Means Lower Costs AND a Safer Environment
New Field Digital Processes, Applications and Equipment Field Digital Processes. Access to broadband data in the field lets police officers a) identify criminals for more arrests; b) automatically write tickets and generate more revenue; and c) use slack time in the field to compile reports, allowing them to stay on patrol longer each shift. Transformation by the Numbers This sample quantitative analysis of police department business processes and business case projection demonstrates the dramatic savings available when the tasks of protection and service are viewed in new ways. Labor & Operations Efficiency Step One: Analysis. A departmental review of business processes and costs shows the following: Annual Cost of one patrol officer: Cost of one missed ticket: Cost to fight one frivolous lawsuit for false arrest: Step Two: Strategy. With an integrated wireless broadband network, enable a) patrol officers to complete reports in the field to avoid overtime; b) more efficient dispatch to reduce drive time; c) reduction of crime & lawsuit costs through video surveillance cameras; and d) automatic tickets through license plate recognition software & cameras to generate more revenue. Step Three: Running the Numbers. a. Reduce Overtime Costs Summary: Savings & New Revenue As the Police Department gets more effective with these new tools, we can add one more assumption: in Year 3, the planned addition of one more officer to the force is canceled, which results in five years of savings, for an additional savings of $70,000+5*($110,000) = $620,000.
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Posted on June 12, 2008 at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) Good Government Management: A Balancing ActI've started summarizing Lessons Learned and this week I rolled out several marketing pieces at the Texas Association of Government IT Managers (TAGITM)'s 30th Anniversary conference in San Antonio. It was a great two days, at the beautiful Westin La Canterra Resort, and my hat's off to those folks. They do what they do well. Lots of interesting conversation and dialogue with city officials and a variety of vendors, wandering around the trade show floor. More on that later, but for now, here's the first document that summarizes my assessment: Cities are in for a world of hurt with the slumping economy and the old ways of dealing with slumps are, well, pretty miserable. There's a better way. Across the board salary cuts, RIFs, wage freezes ... "sharing the pain" - "we've got to buckle down until times get better." Yechh, I can just hear it. My conclusion from all that's happened in our industry, is that there's a better alternative to the traditional way of managing a downturn in the economy. There's a better way than the two options of simply lowering costs or raising taxes when everything heads south...there's a Door Number Three to consider (thanks to my friend Ed Braddy for that one!)... And behind Door Number Three is a Field Digital Transition - the first brief then, after the jump...
The key to sound city government management is balancing costs with revenues...but city budgets are under growing pressure from increasing costs and decreasing revenues, leading to traditional belt-tightening: cutting back on jobs or services, or both. Alternately, balance is possible by using new tools and new processes to work smarter. A Perfect Storm of Bad News A perfect storm of negative economic trends threatens city budget managers in cities both large and small with direct and indirect consequences. Rising Fuel Costs. As the price of gasoline soars, unbudgeted city fuel expenses must be accommodated. Given such bad news, city management is left with few options under traditional business practices. Budgets will be scrutinized, salaries and wages frozen, and across the board reductions implemented. Pain must be shared. When governments fail to keep the books balanced, bankruptcies are rarer than with individuals or businesses. Cities continue to work through their problems until they find a solution. Pinned Down by Old Assumptions People and Processes. Bureaucracies use labor to deliver services to citizens. One view of those in government is to keep a tight lid on costs, no matter what, while others would deliver services to those most in need. A rising economy eases pressures, while a flat or sinking economy sees tensions mount as factions argue over how to adjust to increasing pressures and still meet goals. Old assumptions limit solutions to variations on painful belt-tightening, but thinking about old problems in new ways unlocks win/win solutions that improve on belt-tightening and ease tensions.
Field Digital Transition: A New Set of Tools and Assumptions New Digital Processes, Applications and Equipment for Efficiency in the Field Under the twin shocks of uncontrollable added costs and reduced revenues, the standard response is to cut labor costs and reduce services, but that leaves the city weaker and provides citizens less. The urgency of added budget pressures provides an opportunity for a better way of looking at government operations, which introduces new digital processes, applications, and equipment to make the city stronger and more productive. Digital Processes. New technology lets us look at old problems in new ways. Sending staffers out into the field in cars and trucks to gather information, returning to the office when necessary, is inefficient, when alternatives exist. Transformation by the Numbers A quantitative analysis of current business processes sets a benchmark for improvement. A straightforward business case projection demonstrates savings by challenging assumptions and looking at things in new ways. Step One: Analysis. Transformation starts with a departmental review of select business processes and costs, with a focus on mobility and activity in the field.
Posted on June 12, 2008 at 09:32 PM | Comments (0) From Valley to Beltway: New Dealer, New Deck, New GameI'll tip my hat to the new constitution YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Meet the new boss If "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was the song that fit the occasion at the Democratic Convention in 1992, when Bill and Hillary, Al and Tipper stepped out amid cascading confetti, highlighting the Baby Boomer transition of power, could "Won't Get Fooled Again" be the song that captures the mood this year, as another generation steps up? While the energy in this video is amazing, and the lyrics some of the angriest and most powerful ever cranked out - pure Rock N Roll genius...it's still just a little too - shall we say, Revolutionary? Angry? Nahh, not gonna happen, too radical ... but it'd be cool if it did. "Won't get fooled again" and the rest of the lyrics certainly seem to capture our national mood - does mine. I sensed a little of the potential power behind this nascent political movement last Tuesday night watching Barack Obama's speech in Minnesota, and since then, there's been plenty of analysis on how the primary unfolded the way it did and how the insurgent campaign of Barack Obama was able to defeat the once and still formidable Clinton machine. The best explanation I've seen so far of "how it happened" has to do with how Silicon Valley helped make Barack Obama the candidate by leveraging the power of the Internet and social networks to fund raise and activate an army of committed ground forces in every state. I wrote about it last week in Grasshoppers v. Ants, the Power of Networking. I offer three articles today that analyze further how this insurgency happened and what such change portends for the general election and beyond. First, Blow Up the Beltway by Internet pioneer Dave Winer. But back to my point. As much as I believe in the idea of Obama, if he doesn't live up to it, I'll still believe in the idea, because I always have. I don't want to be an insider, I don't want the insiders to rule, I don't want there to be insiders at all. I want to distribute opportunity and acknowledge intelligence and goodness where ever it appears. I fought against the centralized Inside The Beltway way of doing things in Silicon Valley, and we won. Of course a new aristocracy pops up but their power is as thin as the people whose power got popped in every bubble that came before. The Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts. It erases every barrier to entry. The only way to win is to point off-site, in every way you can think of. Win by offering better value, not by locking users in. People will become instant refugees to escape your clutches. Think you're immune? Think again. In Meet the new boss, nothing like the old boss, on his weblog, Doc Searls, one of the authors of the 1999 groundbreaking Cluetrain Manifesto, elaborates. But we're done with that. I think even the talk radio addicts who hate all Democrats by reflex know the old gig is up. The reason has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with Democracy 2.0. That's the one where the threshold of participation narrows toward zero. We're not there yet, but we're headed that way. Obama is leading the way, but it's not just about him, or his candidacy, or his policies. It's about the Net. And the Net is us. It's all outside, not inside. And it's not just about elections. It's about governance. How we do it matters more than what we do with it. And we've hardly begun to visit that one. Micah L. Sifry on his site, TechPresident, provides perhaps the best technical analysis in But there's another big reason why Obama's victory is so important. He is riding herd on the largest and most potent new political organization anyone has seen on the American landscape in at least sixteen years. He's probably got anywhere from four to eight million email addresses on top of his 1.5 million donors and 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking platform. What happens with this organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? For us here at techPresident, a website that is focused on how the candidates are using the web, and the web is using them, by the time November rolls around, this could be the billion-dollar question. This isn't the first time this question has arisen in modern American politics, by the way. And usually the answer is "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss." It's just that the internet should force us to think about the possibilities of a different answer. Not only that, I think Obama is thinking about a different answer. Sifry details how sustainability and impact happens when a man creates and promotes a movement beyond himself, as he claims Obama has done, rather than subordinating the movement to the ego of the man, as he reflects on the potential of three candidates who preceded Obama: Jesse Jackson, Ross Perot, and Howard Dean. Further, he outlines the formula we can expect to see more of: 1) Create the best organization; and 2) Add internet-powered transparency. Sifry concludes: By building the "best political organization in America," one in which millions of people are in touch with each other online, activated and inspired, and then by putting more information out there about what the government is trying to do (and who is opposing it), Obama seems to envision working with his organization, as well as internet-powered transparency, to overcome the institutional special-interest choke hold paralyzing Washington. Personally, I find this vision pretty breathtaking, even if we don't know all the details yet. It is challenging my hard-earned cynicism about leaders and political movements. Will it work? And will Obama's activists follow him wherever he leads? (When his campaign tried to weed out some of the more independent activists in his California operation earlier this spring, that boneheaded move led to an instant web-based rebellion that caused Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to reverse the decision within 24 hours.) These could be the most important questions facing what is already the most audacious and successful insurgency to arise in American electoral politics in my lifetime. I can't wait to see what happens. Stay Tuned, there's more here than meets the eye! I think we may need to revisit and edit that cynical concluding line penned by The Who 37 years ago ... more like "Meet the New Boss, Not Like the Old Boss..." Posted on June 09, 2008 at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) The Clouds on the Horizon are Chickens Coming Home to Roost
It's a gloomy time in America, as dark clouds move in. The economic conclusion is becoming inescapable, the chickens are coming home to roost. The fact of consequences is an age-old truism - see it here in this biblical quotation: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Galatians 6:7 KJV It's right there in the headlines in the paper of record, the NY Times, as the stock market takes it on the chin yesterday ... Job Losses and Surge in Oil Spread Gloom on Economy. We've been kicking the can down the road for some time now, delaying the inevitable comeuppance of our lifestyles. We are, it seems, our own worst enemies. I don't subscribe to a victim mentality, so I can't make the leap that so many others seem eager to do, as they cast about and see the US as a nation of victims. We just have so much going for us in the first place to ever claim victimhood: we're smart, we have resources, and we have a history of leading ourselves out of disaster, finding a way out of the dark, into the light. And the way we generally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps is thus: there comes a time when we finally have to face the facts and let our innovation, creativity, and diligence lead us out. How did we get to where we are today? The signposts were there, had we only heeded them. Oh, hindsight really is 20/20! First we saw the rise of the two-income household in the 1970s - "good, you might say, at least we were willing to work to support our improved lifestyle." But why did we need more and more money just to buy more and more stuff? (See The Party Never Ends ... Cartoon Lemonade and The Story of Stuff from back in January) Then, back when it was "Morning in America" in the 1980s, we saw a resurgence of the stock market AND a resurgence of gas guzzling SUVs with our newfound wealth - "Maybe we could pump oil out of the ground forever ... at least, we felt rich back then!" But then what did we do? We shorted ourselves on long-term investments like alternative energy and infrastructure and instead spent our money on short-term lifestyle improvements. Cars got bigger, trucks got bigger (our waistlines got bigger) and houses got bigger and bigger. Where would this path take us? How much more could we consume? This song from Austin's own Timbuk 3 seemed to capture the spirit of the times back in the early 80s... The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. Man, those really were the days...I love this song! Then came a rise in borrowing against the equity locked safely away in homes in the 1990s and 2000s - "We're still rich! Whoaa, even richer, when you count all the extra cash I just pulled from my house!!" Now, in rapid succession, we've had the following over the past few years ... yechh! At the root of much of this bad economic news is a little bit of fate and a whole lot of self-inflicted damage, human behavior that resists living according to principles and understanding boundaries and limits, and resists reality. More on the jump. Consistently, we Americans have resisted the call to conserve and live within boundaries. It's as if it's in our national DNA to squander resources and deny the rule of consequences, which as we know, in our heart of hearts, is as inevitable as the law of gravity. "Saving and living conservatively? That's for saps, not us!", at least that's what our inimitable Vice President says: "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Vice President Dick Cheney, April 30, 2001 Just as an aside, on how things can always get much, much worse, we would do well to remember those innocent early pre-9/11 days of the Bush administration when there was slight news coverage of VP Dick Cheney's meetings behind closed doors with oil executive buddies to forge an energy policy. Hmmmm, don't you just wonder what they said, back when oil was 30-something dollars a barrel (now at $140/barrel and heading north with a bullet) ...those meetings were a sign that few of us heeded. And then along came 9/11 and the Iraq War to put things in perspective. It all began to spiral out of control ... But it's not all gloom and doom today because - at least in my own skewed world view - there's always a door back at the end of the room that offers us all a way out, or at a minimum, a bit of sunshine and a way to take some personal control - written on that particular door is "Integrated Digital Transition." More about that in a minute. The first challenge we each must address in the face of such daunting bad news these days is to overcome feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair. It's not unusual to get depressed when such bad news hits home - and it's going to keep on coming at us, folks. The bad times seem to stretch out endlessly into the future and that realization can lead to paralysis and even, denial. It's too easy to shrug one's shoulders and say "Oh well, what can I do ..." and keep on doing what you've been doing, hoping someone else will take the reins, or maybe the problem will just go away. Fact is, we've done that already, for too, too long, and guess what, the problems don't in fact go away, they stay, and they get worse! In fact, there's lots we each of us can do, each one of us, and it starts by taking a personal inventory of how we live our lives. We each need to look at our current set of assumptions and challenge ourselves to do things more economically and less wastefully - that's acknowledging reality. Little acts of conservation and redirection have big impacts when looked at collectively, and they have a way of lifting each of us out of the funk the bad news drags us down into. We have done things the same way for so long that we don't realize how wasteful we can be and how far we can go to make things better. First, I recommend paying more attention to leaders and choosing leaders that "get it." The old ways of doing things won't cut it any more. At the local, regional, state, and federal level, we should be picking leaders who are poised to adapt to change and do things in new ways. Personally, I like Obama, not because he's an inspiring orator, and he most certainly is, but because he appears committed and ready to try new things and new ways to solve old, vexing problems and take us in new, positive directions. Second, we should each take a long hard look at what we do and why we do it as a society. We can start to align our priorities and spending with our values and available tools to ensure that we are spending our money and our time in the right places, for the right things, as effectively as possible. We can start to prepare for some sustained hard times, which will come with the sustained high prices of all goods and services brought on by expensive oil. Instead of moaning for government intervention to lower gas taxes temporarily, for instance, as Hillary and John McCain would have had us do a few weeks ago, why shouldn't we start contemplating how we could live good lives with expensive gasoline? The Europeans somehow manage that feat, after all! On that note, I bought a Civic Hybrid one year ago (love it - 40 MPG!) and I'm trading in my Ford Expedition next month when the lease expires for a new Honda CRV. My little actions won't change the world, far from it, but they make me feel more in control and bring my behavior more in line with my values, and in my own little way, I get to lower my carbon footprint while lightening the load on my wallet. What's so bad about that??? So next, by substituting investing for spending wherever possible, we can begin to reap some savings over time. That's what I'm doing when I invested in fuel efficient vehicles that would lower my operating expenses over time. And that's what city government leaders should be doing with digital applications, new business processes, and broadband infrastructure - attacking labor and service expense by investing in broadband applications and network infrastructure - investing in Integrated Digital Transition. Finally, by taking control of our destiny, by taking control of ever more details, we begin to forget how depressed we were , how put upon by external events, and we start to develop the very important skill of getting more out of less. The skill of efficiency doesn't come naturally, but it feels good the more you do it. After months and years of wringing out inefficiencies, you stop and look back and wonder how you ever could have been so wasteful! With a paradigm shift from wasteful consumption of resources to doing more with less, it no longer feels like you are deprived and are suffering under adverse economic conditions. Rather, it feels like this is a new, normal state, and it's natural to scrimp and save and get the most out of what we have. As the proverb advises us, "Waste Not, Want Not." As individuals, as a society, as a nation, we can do far better than we've done in the past. We just have to have sufficient motivation to change our old ways of doing things and to take on new lifestyles and business practices. Left to our own devices, we'd just keep on keepin' on. Why not? The good news is - it now looks like the economy is about to give us all the motivation and incentive we need! Since we're consulting proverbs, why not turn to one of the best sources of wisdom around, closing out this post the way we came in? The Bottom Line Looks like we've got good news and bad news .. the bad news is: The Economy Sucks!!! The good news is: With our wasteful lifestyles and business practices, we've got a long, long way to go, with lots of fat to cut along the way... So don't worry folks - WE WILL SURVIVE! UPDATE: Sunday Morning comics echo my comments...
Posted on June 07, 2008 at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) Grasshoppers v. Ants, the Power of Networking
The disruptive effects of the internet are really quite incredible, when you think about it. (See the series of posts I did on Structural Change, starting back in early February.) While so much has been made about Obama's capturing the Democratic nomination - a truly historic event for this country for a major political party to nominate an African-American candidate - much less has been made of the incredible organizing and fund-raising effort of his campaign, founded in large part on leveraging the tools found out on the internet. (I covered that aspect pretty well in Top Down v. Bottom Up on May 26.) That's how innovation works - while any of the candidates could have used these tools, it took Obama and his group of innovators to actually do it and show the rest. This bodes well for our political future, I think. What strikes me about Obama, setting his progressive politics and potential for real change aside for a moment, is that he seems to capture the magic that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell did when they launched Microsoft, Apple, and Dell and built billion dollar fortunes and business empires. Consider: Similarly, in Another Contrast, blogger John Cole explores the impact of the Obama campaign on organizational dynamics in today's politics and in Compare Speeches, the power of group movement v. identity politics orientation. Time Magazine does a good job exploring the Obama campaign and its potential impact on politics in How Obama Did It. More than seven months later, that faith has been rewarded. The 2008 presidential campaign has produced its share of surprises, but one of the most important is that a newcomer from Chicago put together by far the best political operation of either party. Obama's campaign has been that rare, frictionless machine that runs with the energy of an insurgency and the efficiency of a corporation. His team has lacked what his rivals' have specialized in: there have been no staff shake-ups, no financial crises, no change in game plan and no visible strife. Even its campaign slogan - "Change we can believe in" - has remained the same. How did he do it? How did Obama become the first Democratic insurgent in a generation or more to knock off the party's Establishment front-runner? Facing an operation as formidable as Clinton's, Obama says in an interview, "was liberating... What I'd felt was that we could try some things in a different way and build an organization that reflected my personality and what I thought the country was looking for. We didn't have to unlearn a bunch of bad habits." First, I'd reflect that having the ability to bring together a team and execute as Obama did with his campaign is a sign of strong leadership. Second, having the confidence to strike out in a new direction as Obama did, to "try some things in a different way ..." is the hallmark of an innovator and a leader, a bona fide change agent. The campaign is the first test and demonstration of a potential president's leadership style, character, and ability, so his execution in going down a different path and accomplishing a stretch goal in an unconventional way gives me confidence that he will be able to apply that same methodology to other problems that vex our society and have success. I don't for a minute think that he will not suffer failures and mistakes along the way - the problems are too great to think that - but I admire his spirit, respect his abilities, and believe that this approach that he took with his campaign is about the best we can hope for in a political leader, given our current circumstances. Keep in mind - we may be electing a president (an individual), but we're getting an entire executive administration and an approach to governing (a team and a movement). His choices so far have worked out pretty remarkably. Let's hope that the trend line continues. And for a rather different perspective on structural change, but somehow linked to this discussion when we think about the impact of digitization on culture, see NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Paul Krugman's Bits, Bands and Books, Paying for Creativity in a Digital World. This year, it just keeps getting more interesting... Posted on June 06, 2008 at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) Science for the Masses
When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it's easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions. And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon - stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology - we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there's simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future. Put a Little Science in Your Life The last few weeks, I've been in the process of honing an economic argument for broadband applications, business process improvement changes, and metropolitan broadband networks. And I think it grows more compelling by the day. See Putting the Cart Before the Horse for more details. But here comes an OpEd from the Sunday NY Times by Brian Greene, a professor of physics at Columbia, and author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. He makes an argument that science is at the center of our lives and indeed, understanding science not only makes life more worth living, but it unifies us as we come to understand its wonders. His thoughts spurred in me an equally compelling, if more eloquent argument to my economic one for why we need to become ridiculously connected to all the world's information - we need robust broadband in our lives so that everyone, literally, can have the ready access to information that some of us have come to enjoy through the Internet and the marvelous search engines, social networks, blogs, and websites that make this rich world all so accessible. We desperately need more rational thought in our society. Science has become such a big part of our lives, and too few in our society appreciate its many intricacies. Much of Greene's article focuses on the teaching of science, and how our schools and teachers, with best intentions, drive kids away from science. He argues that we should start with instilling wonder in the marvels of the universe and science by teaching the big picture first, and then going back to build the fundamentals using that wonder as the energy to keep kids engaged. In contrast, most teachers today subscribe to the pedagogical approach of first teaching the building blocks, getting kids to first master the fundamental details so that the bigger ideas that follow can be better understood. Problem is that in practice, by the time teachers get to the really sexy stuff, they've lost many kids' interest. I'm with Dr. Greene - we need to grab 'em up front with the sexy stuff - win their hearts, then their minds will follow. At times I feel we've become in such a hurry in our busy lives to solve vexing problems, make money and satisfy our many needs and desires (all very serious adult pursuits, after all), that we easily lose sight of the wonderful world we live in and all that there is to experience and enjoy (the child's viewpoint). But the future can be a bright one. If we can just find a way to power through this decidedly unsexy phase, where we must build the infrastructure that under girds the information society, we will come out on the other side with a new world where information is literally and figuratively right at our fingertips, there for the asking, there for the taking. When that day comes, those who enjoy the benefits of ubiquitous broadband connectivity may not understand the struggle of those who went before them to build the underlying infrastructure, but they will enjoy the fruits of our labor. And we who built it will know that it was our efforts that made it possible. We will have lit up the world with information, just like our forefathers lit it up with electricity and light. And we used science to make it happen. These are the deeper motivations that keep me going in this quest to build broadband into our lives. The last word to Dr. Greene: Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that's been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living. It's the birthright of every child, it's a necessity for every adult, to look out on the world, as the soldier in Iraq did, and see that the wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides us. Posted on June 04, 2008 at 05:36 AM | Comments (0) Digital Transition v. Municipal WirelessThe astute reader of this website will notice a change in the upper left corner of the main page...I don't get around to changing the "Featured Topic" section nearly as often as I should, and the "Exaflood" topic had cobwebs hanging from it. Mea Culpa. Managing this site is not unlike managing a household, or your desk. Sometimes you can overlook a desk drawer, and forget that it has a purpose other than to catch all the stray things that don't have a proper place. Maintenance of this site is an ongoing challenge, and I tend to focus on the blog posts, leaving the edges on their own. So, its news to me when I shift my focus and address a lingering issue. I've updated the Featured Topic with what I think is a very important discussion item - Digital Transition. I've added this new term to the glossary, and consider this a key point and new direction for us all. Digital Transition -The term "Digital Transition" describes the process all organizations must go through in the 21st Century, as they leverage new technologies that provide new options for Applications, Equipment, Processes, and Networks that make them more effective. In contrast, the term "Municipal Wireless" is limiting. It puts the network technology ahead of the application and process changes that drive the business case. A good way to understand this issue is to consider analog v. digital. Analog technology was revolutionary in the 20th century, when radio and television changed the landscape through exploitation of better understanding of how radio frequencies behaved. But with the advent of the transistor and the integrated circuit, a digital alternative was born and it matured in the second half of the twentieth century. As this digital progress was employed with the internet at the turn of the century, the potential of the transformation became apparent, and private sector companies began to leverage the new tools to be more competitive. Public sector organizations are lagging now, and have much ground to make up to be more effective. Thus, the "analog" approach reflects a 20th century mindset that still relies upon paper-based data, labor inputs, and manual processes. A "digital" approach demonstrates a 21st century perspective that takes advantage of low-cost, high-power digital computers and storage devices, VOIP communication devices and broadband networks to transform the potential of organizations. Undergoing a digital transition is a complex task that starts with a paradigm shift regarding the nature of the job, and a rewriting of the processes used to accomplish business objectives. Because digital technology evolves rapidly, a digital transition is more of an ongoing process than it is an event with a beginning and an end. Is it such a big deal what you choose to call something? Actually, it's a bigger deal than we realize, because how we define an issue drives the discussion. As long as we refer to "Municipal Wireless," we're stuck talking about cities and mobile technology. Private uses of wireless broadband, and FTTH are left out, technically, when the title is "Municipal Wireless." When I relaunched this site in January 2006, I recognized even then the limits of the term "Municipal Wireless," and the name of my original website, "UnwireMyCity," could be. I began to talk instead about Metropolitan Broadband, expanding the discussion to include regional perspectives, beyond the boundaries of municipal initiatives, and shed the limits of "wireless" to include all broadband technologies. Little did I realize at the time how limited even that term, "Metropolitan Broadband," would be. Because now I believe that has become limiting, and the larger issue is not networks, regions, or broadband. It is getting work done in the most efficient manner with the best tools. The challenge we face is that we have all focused on the network so far, when the act of changing requires that you first capture the attention of those needed to accomplish the change. And wrapping one's brain around the complexities of broadband networks has proven to be too big a leap for the general public. What is far more relevant to decision-makers, and far more common to so many more people, is the impact of digital technology on our lives, and the opportunity to use digital technology to make our lives better. Here's a slide from a keynote presentation I delivered, believe it or not, back in September 2005, titled "The Future of Community Broadband." With this slide back then, I was making a point about the trend to Mobility, which is an aspect of Digital Transition. These two columns demonstrate the switch from analog to digital.
The 21st Century will see a transition from analog to digital. And we will see a computing transition from a fixed activity where one is tied to a cord in the wall, to a mobile activity where the computing device goes along with the person. That is what I call the "March to Mobility." The reason we'll see both of these transitions is because they are liberating changes, saving both time and effort, providing more for less. As we come under increasing pressures to do more with less, we will collectively turn to new tools, and the pressure to undergo a Digital Transition will grow greater and greater. At some point, the Pain of Change will become less than the Pain of Staying the Same. When that point hits, organizational leaders will turn to new digital solutions to transform the way they do business. Better to start now, go through the change, and come out better equipped to deal with the problems of modern life, than to deny the changes needed and hold on to the past. Posted on June 03, 2008 at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) Top Down v. Bottom Upor, "Elites, Masses and Hierarchies v. People and Networks" The original title of this post was "It's the Networks, Stupid!" - the closing line of Roger Cohen's Op Ed in today's NY Times that inspired me to write this (see The Obama Connection). But I just couldn't go with one more "It's the ____________, Stupid!" title in less than one week (see my previous post on this site, It's the Applications, Stupid!, from last week). I risk confusing the audience with too many of these type titles, I think, not to mention the blow to my creative side ... I can do better than that. The power of networks is a topic near and dear to my heart. Perhaps one of the most compelling books I've read and re-read, and which I'll recommend here is found in the Books section, my own on-line book shelf, where I keep memorable books that drive the thoughts I write about. That book is of course, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a pioneer in the field of network science. Linked describes the incredible impact that networks have on our lives: the simple concept that multiple items can be Nodes connected by Links to form Networks. From biological systems (Ecosystems, your brain), to political (see the NY Times Op/Ed today, and below) to sociological (how cities function, this website's favorite topic), it explains such things as the Power Law Curve (aka the Long Tail) and the impact of Hubs, highly connected Nodes. Cohen focuses on the amazing fund raising of Obama, perhaps the most visible result of his focus on leveraging social networks and new technologies to an unprecedented degree in a presidential campaign. In his Op Ed, he highlights a new book that details the impact of networks on global politics, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization by David Singh Grewal. Why are these subjects relevant in terms of metropolitan broadband, in terms of today? Because of Obama's rise in prominence, the power of networking is getting a new focus at the popular level. Obama's campaign will be studied and emulated, win or lose. Of course, I've been an early Obama fan, not the least because of his potential to bring badly-needed change to our country and the world, so I am a firm believer that Obama will triumph in November, ushering in a new era of focus on what we can do differently as a society and nation to solve problems. Obama's mandate for change, coupled with his team's sophistication and awareness of how to leverage new technologies and the power of the network, give renewed hope to my vision of a world of Networked Metropolitan Areas, or MetroNets, linked together in a manner akin to the Internet. The lack of broadband infrastructure is one of the problems waiting to be addressed by the new administration. A solution based on new parameters can happen with the kind of focus and awareness an Obama victory will bring. The old way of doing things is highlighted well in this other article, this one from yesterday's NY Times Weekend Edition section. In Class of '08: The Snare of Privilege , the role of Political and Social Elites is dissected. Hard to believe that every president in the past 20 years has graduated from Yale (OK, that's just three presidents, and two from the same family). Enough of a good thing already! But this odd fact certainly makes the case for the enduring, if little understood power of Elites in our society and politics. Just why do the Ivy League colleges endure? Controlling the levers of power and working the controls from the background, Elites sit atop a hierarchy and manipulate the masses through processes like elections, with the purpose of maintaining their exalted position in society - it's far preferable to hand the reins of power over temporarily to another elite than it is to subvert the entire system of Elite control. In America, Elites stick together through things like exclusive access to Ivy League schools and fraternities and sororities, country clubs and cotillions. Such is the essence of Elite political theory. My professor from the UT Graduate School of Government, Dr. John Higley, is one of the authors of this theory, claiming that Elites have always ruled society, and presumably, always will. He certainly made an impression on me twenty years ago with his ideas. I ran into Dr. Higley at the health club two days ago and he clued me into the upcoming NY Times article. My question to ponder here is whether networks will be able to change this truism of the hegemony of Elites. It could be that technology and a growing awareness of the power of Social Networking may yet bring that about. Gorenberg, a partner in the San Francisco venture-capital firm of Hummer Winblad, was representative of a certain kind of prosperous Northern California Democrat whom the war and the general climate of Bush-administration malfeasance had pushed from casual supporter to committed activist. And he was representative of Silicon Valley, in that he thought in terms of networks. Partly, this was his job: a venture capitalist looking to invest in the next big thing must know everything that is happening and everyone who is making it happen. But everyone else was thinking about networks, too. The Valley was still emerging from the crash of 2001, yet it was already clear that the next boom would be in social-networking entities like MySpace and Facebook, which created vast, interconnected communities on the Web. The Amazing Money Machine by Joshua Green in the June issue of The Atlantic This is indeed an excellent article - you should pause and check it out - because it lays out how truly revolutionary the campaign organizing of Obama has been. Let's face it, did any of us imagine a year ago that we'd be watching Hillary's juggernaut stalling at this point? Certainly, Hillary, the DNC, and her legion of supporters didn't. We're witnessing the changing of the guard between 20th and 21st century politics, as Hillary's candidacy slowly grinds to a halt and struggles to find a way to accept defeat. It's awesome and painful to watch. I asked Roos, the personification of a buttoned-down corporate attorney, if there had been concerns about Obama's limited CV, and for a moment he looked as if he might burst out laughing. "No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, 'You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience,'" he explained, after a diplomatic pause. "Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google. The YouTube guys were also in their 20s. So were the guys who started Facebook. And I'll tell you, we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that's ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership." "Ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership" are also the hallmarks of change agents. We need more of those in the metropolitan broadband industry right now. It may or may not happen that this election will see Obama rise to the presidency. But his campaign promises to leverage technology and raise to prominence the power of social networks and the internet. Folks, the toothpaste is officially out of the tube. There will be no putting it back in after this election cycle. Social networks are here to stay, and we have only begun to investigate their power to promote Progressive Politics and harness the power of the people. If I were a Political Elite, I'd be sweating right now. I think they are. In the absence of an evolution of power, which has never seem to come, I'm hoping for a gentle revolution with Obama, one focused more on Bottom Up change and The Wisdom of the Crowds. Posted on May 26, 2008 at 07:25 AM | Comments (0) It's the Applications, Stupid!"It's the economy, stupid," was a phrase in American politics widely used during Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush. For a time, Bush was considered unbeatable because of foreign policy developments such as the end of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. The phrase, coined by Clinton campaign strategist James Carville, refers to the notion that Clinton was a better choice because Bush had not adequately addressed the economy, which had recently undergone a recession. In order to keep the campaign on message, Carville hung a sign in Bill Clinton's Little Rock campaign headquarters with the following three points[citation needed]: 1. Change vs. more of the same
Here's the sign I'd like to see hung on the wall of every marketing department in any company involved with the Metropolitan Broadband Industry: 1. Change v. more of the same In it's first iteration, this industry got caught up in selling the network, when in fact it's the applications that the city government folks want. So, if that's what they want, I say give them applications. I recommend that the discussion shift to the Digital Transition that all city departments must go through, of which the wireless broadband network is merely the enabler. In this analysis, we put the cart before the horse by building a Field of Dreams. "Build it, and they will come." Imagine if we had been focused on the game of baseball (Digital Transition), with its attendant baseball gloves, bats & balls (wireless applications and end use devices), and forming teams and a league (business and change processes). Get the league started, and the fields will be built as a matter of course, because if you want to play baseball, you need somewhere to play the game. You need a baseball diamond (wireless broadband network). We've had baseball as our "national sport" for over 100 years, it's in people's genes...so, perhaps, a baseball diamond in a corn field could be imagined to be so attractive as to be a good business plan. But broadband is far, far newer. it is not yet embedded in the nation's psyche. It will be, but not yet. We should not assume that people will value broadband as baseball fans do baseball. But people everywhere have a job to do, and they understand doing it better for less inputs - efficiency is a broadly understood and appreciated concept. Wireless applications are all about efficiency, doing more for less. People get that, where they don't yet get the concept of ubiquitous broadband. In the early days of electricity, people may not have fully understood the future transformation of society that electricity would bring, but they came to the lights like moths to a flame. Attendees flocked to the World's Columbian Exposition held in 1893 (aka the Chicago World's Fair). Drawn by the bright lights, farmers formed long lines to marvel at the brightness. The inner Court of Honor area, which came to be called The White City, was painted in white and illuminated by streetlights powered by the new alternating current of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, who had beat out Thomas Edison's General Electric bid. To the tenement dwellers and farmers attending at night, it must have seemed as if heaven had come down to earth! I highly recommend two books by Erik Larson - the first describes the background drama behind the Columbian Exposition and the changes and tensions at the Fin de Siecle: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. If you haven't read Larson, he does a great job at tying together history with the drama of the time. See also the story of the invention of wireless, as told in Thunderstruck, where the reader gets two stories in one: as Marconi's slow progress in unlocking the mysteries of wireless radio unfold, so do the sordid facts behind the murder of the century. A thoroughly enjoyable read for me, and revealing for all I learned about wireless radio's origins. But, back to the Wikipedia article on the World's Columbian Exposition, which showcased the marvels that would transform the twentieth century, principally the new electricity technology and electric light, it's most compelling application. The International Exposition was held in a building which for the first time was devoted to electrical exhibits. General Electric Company (backed by Edison and J.P. Morgan) had proposed to power the electric exhibits with direct current at the cost of one million dollars. However, Westinghouse, armed with Tesla's alternating current system, proposed to illuminate the Columbian Exposition in Chicago for half that price, and Westinghouse won the bid. It was a historical moment and the beginning of a revolution, as Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced the public to electrical power by providing alternating current to illuminate the Exposition. All the exhibits were from commercial enterprises. Thomas Edison, Brush, Western Electric, and Westinghouse had exhibits, and the general public observed firsthand the qualities and abilities of alternating current power. Tesla's high-frequency high-voltage lighting produced more efficient light with quantitatively less heat. A two-phase induction motor was driven by current from the main generators to power the system. Edison tried to prevent the use of his light bulbs in Tesla's works. Westinghouse's proposal was chosen over the less efficient direct-current system to power the fair. General Electric banned the use of Edison's lamps in Westinghouse's plan, in retaliation for losing the bid. Westinghouse's company quickly designed a double-stopper lightbulb (sidestepping Edison's patents) and was able to light the fair. The Westinghouse Company displayed several polyphase systems. The exhibits included a switchboard, polyphase generators, step-up transformers, transmission line, step-down transformers, commercial size induction motors and synchronous motors, and rotary direct current converters (including an operational railway motor). The working scaled system allowed the public a view of a system of polyphase power which could be transmitted over long distances, and be utilized, including the supply of direct current. Meters and other auxiliary devices were also present. Tesla displayed his phosphorescent lighting, powered without wires by high-frequency fields. Tesla displayed the first practical phosphorescent lamps (a precursor to fluorescent lamps). Tesla's lighting inventions exposed to high-frequency currents would bring the gases to incandescence. Tesla also displayed the first neon lights. His innovations in this type of light emission were not regularly patented. Also among the exhibits was Tesla's demonstration, most notably the "Egg of Columbus". This device explains the principles of the rotating magnetic field and his induction motor. The Egg of Columbus consisted of a polyphase field coil underneath a plate with a copper egg positioned over the top. When the sequence of coils were energized, the magnetic field arrangement inductively created a rotation on the egg and made it stand up on end (appearing to resist gravity). On August 25, Elisha Gray introduced Tesla for a delivery of a lecture on mechanical and electrical oscillators. Tesla explained his work for efficiently increasing the work at high frequency of reciprocation. As Electrical Congress members listened, Tesla delineated mechanisms which could produce oscillations of constant periods irrespective of the pressure applied and irrespective of frictional losses and loads. He continued to explain the working mean of the production of constant period electric currents (not resorting to spark gaps or breaks), and how to produce these with mechanisms which are reliable. The successful demonstration of alternating current lighting at the Exposition dispelled doubts about the usefulness of the polyphase alternating current system developed by Westinghouse and Tesla. UPDATE: Two hours after publishing this item, this is what I hear on NPR, as I drove my kids to school ... I kid you not ... check out the podcast ... Hunt for World's Fair Artifacts Turns Up Junk Archaeologists are digging in a Chicago park that was the scene of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Experts want to find traces of that grand exposition, attended by millions. So far they've mainly found 20th century beer cans. Morning Edition, May 19, 2008 Posted on May 19, 2008 at 05:36 AM | Comments (0) Time to Get to Work
It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted - enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity - big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, "no one can touch us." Who Will Tell the People? - New York Times Love him or hate him, Tom Friedman is back from sabbatical and he's shouting from the mountaintops - this time, he's ranting about the need to mobilize a Can Do spirit in the US. I'd suggest you print up this article and slide a copy under your mayor's or favorite council member's office door. Odds are, if the people support a local infrastructure project that makes good sense, so will the political leadership. America works well when people organize and let their leaders know about it. America works somewhere between "less well" and "not so much" when people sit back and let our leaders do what is politically expedient. We need to get informed, set priorities, and prod our leadership to move out ahead of the parade! I'm with Tom - it's TIME TO GET TO WORK, AMERICA!! Posted on May 12, 2008 at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) Analyst, Sampler, Tire Kicker or Strategic Buyer?
Is your city considering broadband infrastructure and its impact on your future? Still stuck in the analysis phase? I came across some notes I put together five years ago concerning what is known as Miller Heiman's Strategic Selling, a concept and sales approach active among the sales industry, especially appropriate for complex sales to large organizations. Over the past five years as a consultant, I've had two consulting contracts where I've acted as a consultant on behalf of government organizations considering a procurement, first with Austin Energy, a large municipally-owned electric utility, and most recently with the City of San Marcos. It's been quite educational to sit on the Buy Side and watch the various vendors pitch their wares ("There but for the Grace of God go I"), and then turn around after they've left and discuss with my clients - the potential buyers - their opinions on the sales proposition. I've learned a lot. First, let me say - "Folks, there's plenty of work to be done on both sides." Second, I'm sure that my recent experience has made me a much more empathetic seller, should I go back over to that side of the equation. Which leads me to ask the question of my public sector readers: "What kind of buyer are you?" And the follow-up: "Have you given much thought to the Sell/Buy relationship and how you can benefit from a better understanding of what goes on in the dances that we do with folks trying to sell things to us?" After the jump, check out this short discussion on the techniques that good sales people use on a long-term strategic sale to a large organization, and compare it to the multitude of steps that any purchase should go through - see if you recognize yourself as a buyer type, see where you fit in the equation, and how you might improve things, if possible. Notes on Strategic Selling 1. A "Buyer" is really an entire set of buying roles played by different members of the organization So, how much thought do you give to a purchase as a buyer? Which category best describes you as a buyer? And what does that portend for you ever actually getting what it is you purportedly seek as a "Buyer?" Steps in Any Purchase Before we talk about predominate buyer types, a little background is in order. Let's see if I get this mostly right. In any purchase, these steps are generally followed: Does that about capture all the steps any buyer goes through on any purchase? (Let me know if I left anything out! ) So, which TYPE of buyer are you? Analyst? Sampler? Tire Kicker? Strategic Buyer? Analyst: The analyst relies heavily on the research phase of the purchasing process - Steps 2-6 above, with the possibility of dabbling in Step 7. To an analyst, a purchase is all about gathering information and comparing options. This is the most important phase, and it's impossible to ever have "paralysis by analysis." It's really about making absolutely sure that you are ready before moving ahead. The problem for this type buyer, is that when technology is complex and rapidly changing, there is NEVER sufficient evaluation, because the situation is always changing and there is always a better deal and a better time, right around the next bend. (Think, WiMAX, etc.) If you are an Analyst, your biggest challenge is bringing this phase to conclusion, acknowledging that you have Enough information, and are ready to go ahead and engage in the purchase process. Beware of reverting to Steps 2-6 when under stress later in the purchase cycle! Time for more information! - but will more or better information really help?? Tire Kicker. The tire kicker is a more involved version of the Sampler above. The tire kicker is a derogative term that originated from frustrated car salesmen, who despaired that the shoppers would ever make a decision, but would spend all their time kicking the tires of the car and evaluating the purchase. Where there is a legitimate role to engage in a trial period to evaluate a serious purchase, the tire kicker takes this phase to the extreme and gets stuck, never moving on to a purchase. In a sense, the tire kicker is motivated by fear and a lack of confidence. "It's not that I'm afraid to move forward, I'm just a very thorough shopper," they say as they lie to themselves. The biggest risk a tire kicker faces is a loss of faith on the part of sellers, because their failure to take the sales process seriously and come to a conclusion identifies them as "non-serious" and "a waste of my time" in the eyes of serious sellers (the sellers that any serious buyer really wants to deal with over time). Strategic Buyer: The strategic buyer understands that a purchase is a complex social process that involves creating trust on both sides of the equation. To have mutual trust, both the buyer and the seller have a role to play that over time, creates the foundation for a successful sale/purchase, where both parties feel that they got a win ("Win/Win") and leave the sale with respect and admiration for their opposite. A sale is a complex business decision that deserves special attention and resources at each step. A strategy will ensure that the buyer understands exactly what they need, exactly what the market has to offer and how it aligns with their need, and exactly (in the end) the value equation that justifies a Win/Win. Which role most appeals to you? I recommend you take a second look at both the Notes on Strategic Selling and the Steps in Any Purchase check lists above. See what you can learn about your own purchase and the process you have in place, as well as what you can learn about your potential transaction partner, before the transaction gets too far down the road. Posted on May 09, 2008 at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) Metropolitan Broadband: Embracing DestinyA hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces In his epic Star Wars film series, through all six episodes, creator George Lucas traces the mythic character arc of the Hero, be it the anti-hero/chief protagonist, Annekin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader or his son, the true hero, Luke Skywalker. The Hero's Journey, a common process followed by the archetypal hero, is brilliantly documented by professor of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell, in his groundbreaking 1949 work, The Hero of a Thousand Faces. For a special tie in of the academic and the film, I recommend the 1988 Bill Moyers interview series The Power of Myth, actually filmed at George Lucas' studios, aptly named "Skywalker Ranch." What, you may ask, could this possibly have to do with metropolitan broadband? Individuals, cities, AND societies have an opportunity to take a hero's journey whenever they take on a difficult task, face a difficult truth, or accept a difficult challenge and in so doing, take the proverbial Road Less Traveled, bucking the conventional path for one more suited to their needs, but also often one more difficult, even more dangerous or risky. Believe me, politicians do indeed view these projects as dangerous and risky - to their elected positions...but they are forging ahead, nonetheless. When city leaders decide to do the right thing for the right reasons, based on their own situation, even if its less acceptable to those who hold tight to the status quo - they are modeling heroic behavior, acting out of principle rather than going with the flow. In my opinion, city leaders who choose an alternative broadband path after careful deliberation and consultation, be it a wireless or fiber solution, are putting themselves out on the front lines and are engaging in a classic hero's journey. Seattle is taking the hero's path - read about their Fiber project in Daily Wireless' coverage Seattle: Fiber For All. City leaders are choosing to take the reins on their broadband destiny by launching a project, wireless, fiber, or both. They're not doing it because they like to do risky things, or because they're looking for adventure. Rather, they've decided that the future is digital, and they have to move their communities along that path, as I suggested in a post a few months back (see Digital Adolescents Stuck in Digital Puberty). There's a great article in the February 2008 Issue of Broadband Properties Magazine, which goes into good detail and should serve as a good source of background information - see Municipal Broadband: Demystifying Wireless and Fiber Optic Options. The article is subtitled "Communities can greatly benefit from owning municipal broadband networks and opening them to multiple providers. But implementing such The Hero's Journey If you're not familiar with the Hero's Journey I've referenced herein, I recommend you spend a little time reading below. It is uplifting to realize that some of the more challenging tasks you yourself take on, could be examined under these guidelines...who knows, it may change your perspective. Consider these stories, which you're probably familiar with ... Consider this list of films, from Pitch a Screenplay: Know Your Hero's Journey - Titanic (1997) grossed over $600,000,000 – uses the Hero's Journey as a template. - Star Wars (1977) grossed over $460,000,000 - uses the Hero's Journey as a template. - Shrek 2 (2004) grossed over $436,000,000 - uses the Hero's Journey as a template. - ET (1982) grossed over $434,000,000 - uses the Hero's Journey as a template. - Spiderman (2002) grossed over $432,000,000 - uses the Hero's Journey as a template. - Out of Africa (1985), Terms of Endearment (1983), Dances with Wolves (1990), Gladiator (2000) - All Academy Award Winners Best Film are based on the Hero's Journey. - Anti-hero stories (Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) etc) are all based on the Hero's Journey. - Heroine's Journey stories (Million Dollar Baby (2004), Out of Africa (1980) etc) are all based on the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey is also sometimes referred to as the Monomyth. Here are the five key steps: 1. A call to adventure, which the hero has to accept or decline Now doesn't that sound like what a city leader or team goes through in the process to bring more broadband opportunity to their city? For some serious detail, there's the Wikipedia description of the archetypical Hero's Journey, from the entry for The Hero with a Thousand Faces... PART ONE: The Adventure of the Hero Chapter I: Departure * 1. The Call to Adventure The adventure begins with the hero receiving a call to action, such as a threat to the peace of the community, or the hero simply falls into or blunders into it. The call is often announced to the hero by another character who acts as a "herald". The herald, often represented as dark or terrifying and judged evil by the world, may call the character to adventure simply by the crisis of his appearance. * 2. Refusal of the Call In some stories, the hero initially refuses the call to adventure. When this happens, the hero may suffer somehow, and may eventually choose to answer, or may continue to decline the call. * 3. Supernatural Aid After the hero has accepted the call, he encounters a protective figure (often elderly) who provides special tools and advice for the adventure ahead, such as an amulet or a weapon. * 4. The Crossing of the First Threshold The hero must cross the threshold between the world he is familiar with and that which he is not. Often this involves facing a "threshold guardian", an entity that works to keep all within the protective confines of the world but must be encountered in order to enter the new zone of experience. * 5. The Belly of the Whale The hero, rather than passing a threshold, passes into the new zone by means of rebirth. Appearing to have died by being swallowed or having their flesh scattered, the hero is transformed and becomes ready for the adventure ahead. Chapter II: Initiation * 1. The Road of Trials Once past the threshold, the hero encounters a dream landscape of ambiguous and fluid forms. The hero is challenged to survive a succession of obstacles and, in so doing, amplifies his consciousness. The hero is helped covertly by the supernatural helper or may discover a benign power supporting him in his passage. * 2. The Meeting with the Goddess The ultimate trial is often represented as a marriage between the hero and a queenlike, or mother-like figure. This represents the hero's mastery of life (represented by the feminine) as well as the totality of what can be known. When the hero is female, this becomes a male figure. * 3. Woman as the Temptress His awareness expanded, the hero may fixate on the disunity between truth and his subjective outlook, inherently tainted by the flesh. This is often represented with revulsion or rejection of a female figure. * 4. Atonement with the Father The hero reconciles the tyrant and merciful aspects of the father-like authority figure to understand himself as well as this figure. * 5. Apotheosis The hero's ego is disintegrated in a breakthrough expansion of consciousness. Quite frequently the hero's idea of reality is changed; the hero may find an ability to do new things or to see a larger point of view, allowing the hero to sacrifice himself. * 6. The Ultimate Boon The hero is now ready to obtain that which he has set out, an item or new awareness that, once he returns, will benefit the society that he has left.
* 1. Refusal of the Return Having found bliss and enlightenment in the other world, the hero may not want to return to the ordinary world to bestow the boon onto his fellow man. * 2. The Magic Flight When the boon's acquisition (or the hero's return to the world) comes against opposition, a chase or pursuit may ensue before the hero returns. * 3. Rescue from Without The hero may need to be rescued by forces from the ordinary world. This may be because the hero has refused to return or because he is successfully blocked from returning with the boon. The hero loses his ego. * 4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold The hero returns to the world of common day and must accept it as real. * 5. Master of the Two Worlds Because of the boon or due to his experience, the hero may now perceive both the divine and human worlds. * 6. Freedom to Live The hero bestows the boon to his fellow man. Posted on April 15, 2008 at 09:11 PM | Comments (0) Yeah, What He Said!It's reassuring when a highly paid Op Ed columnist at the NY Times says basically what I just said, the very next day. I wrote a post yesterday titled, Down the Rabbit Hole ... Numbers, far, wide ... and tall, in which I detailed the growing insanity of the very large numbers that we are spending daily to pay for just three things: the Iraq War, Imported Oil, and Tax Cuts for the Wealthy, which I termed WOT. As in, "WOT the Hell have we gotten ourselves into?" I veer into politics because the act of spending on such gargantuan items crowds out spending on the things we really need to spend our hard-earned money on, most notably for me the investments we need to make in infrastructure that will sustain our economy into the 21st century and provide the jobs and standard of living that will support our children and their children. We are way, way off the tracks and in need of a correction. It's time, folks! Here's how Bob Herbert concluded his piece this morning titled "Sharing the Pain." Americans save virtually nothing. They have looted the equity in their homes and driven their credit card balances to staggering heights. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has claimed colossal new standards of fiscal irresponsibility. At some point, to take just one example, someone will have to pay the $3 trillion for the war. This craziness is not sustainable. Without an educated and empowered work force, without sustained investment in the infrastructure and technologies that foster long-term employment, and without a system of taxation that can actually pay for the services provided by government, the American dream as we know it will expire. Sharing the Pain - New York Times We all need to start shouting some version of this message from the mountaintops, because the status quo is not sustainable, and it's killing us and our way of life: LET'S STOP THIS MADNESS! LET'S GET BACK DOWN OFF THE LEDGE! LET'S START ACTING RATIONAL AGAIN - THE PARTY IS OVER! IT'S TIME FOR A CHANGE! Posted on March 11, 2008 at 06:25 AM | Comments (0) Down the Rabbit Hole ... Numbers, far, wide ... and tall
Some days, I really feel we've gone down the proverbial rabbit hole. This happens to be one of them. "Move over Alice, there's more and more of us on the way down to join you in Wonderland." I'm often told these days by serious economic types that wireless broadband is just "too expensive" and "difficult to justify in terms of economics," and well, a variety of other ways of saying - "we can't afford that." For me, that just means that they are not yet tuned in to the new business models we've been discussing on this site (Making Broadband Access a Reality and Broadband Access Diagram). But comments like that also beg this question for me: "Well then, what CAN you afford?" Surely anyone that says that they can't afford something must also have an answer to my question in mind, no? In fact, we get used to saying we can't afford things when in fact we just don't understand them so well - it's a matter of imputing value. And inevitably, it's a matter of priorities - we know that from how we manage our own household budgets - funny how we manage to find money for the things we value. Not so funny how we manage to overlook where all of our money goes so that we can't afford those things that could really help us, the things we really need. Like infrastructure... Sure, we're used to this image of poor people whose habits keep them from acquiring wealth. But the real story of bad habits goes way beyond the local trailer park. Just today, I listened to NPR describing how the Price of Oil just hit a new high of $108/barrel - continuing a progression closely tied to the Iraq War, started in 2003. Increases in the price of oil dramatically impact increases in other prices and are a major contributor to inflation - something they call "Cost-Push Inflation". I'm led down this path because so much is made about what we CAN and CAN'T afford today...don't tell me that these expenses - starting with oil price increases - don't have something to do with the fact that we currently find INVESTMENTS in our own infrastructure so darn expensive. But it's more than the run up in oil prices. Let's label the oil run-up and its impacts on our budget with the letter "O." There's also the Iraq War - "W" and the simultaneous tax breaks - "T" - put them all together and we have WOT - as in WOT the Hell??? People are starting to connect the dots on this economic disaster and how it impacts all of our decisions, down to the local investment level. On to the Iraq War. So much of the debate is on whether or not we're "winning," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean - does the Surge work? That's a distraction. More and more, I think we're going to be hearing about the costs of the war and the impact on our economy. The cost of the war has been in the news especially just recently, with the release of the book by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his co-author, Linda Bilmes, titled The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict and this article describing the book - The Three Trillion Dollar War. Three Trillion Dollars - it's an astounding number...that's $3,000,000,000,000.00 ... Ah, the power of a graphic image....we really need a graphic image when numbers get this big ... sometimes really really - really really - big numbers just lose us in their significance...let's hope more candidates in this election year start tying these two things together, because they are intertwined. The reason our economy is heading into the crapper these days is closely tied to WOT - the War, the price of Oil, and Tax breaks. Some folks out on the web are really trying though to provide relevant lessons on the truly staggering costs of the Iraq War. There's this one - $87,000,000,000.00, which stacks the $1 bills in blocks that get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Now imagine 34 of those stacks, and you are getting close to $3 Trillion...3,000 Billion. In some ways, that stack is hard to beat .. but I'll try. This next website takes a different approach, suggesting what we could have instead of the Iraq War ... this is the tack I hope that the Democratic candidates take in their campaigns. It is truly remarkable. So here is a depiction of $165 Billion, from an article titled Monetary Costs of the Iraq War that has a lot of other tables - I know, boring, show us more pictures.
OK. Here's a Trillion Pennies...
Perhaps the best way to understand the concept of a Trillion is to consider the US National Debt. This picture shows the debt.
For a good explanation of Deficits and Debt, see this link. The largest sustained increase in the national debt occurred from 1980 to 1992, when it rose from $930 million to $4 trillion. Ironically, this is the period of the administrations of Ronald Reagan (1980-1988) and George H. W. Bush (1988-1992) - ironic because Republicans had long been associated in the public mind with fiscal responsibility. Indeed, President Reagan regularly spoke of "those tax-and-spend Democrats." The program of his administration was to "spend and borrow" after cutting taxes. As a result, the national debt tripled during his two terms. Yet President Reagan's strategy for igniting strong growth worked. As I mentioned earlier, the 1970s had been a period of stagflation: slow growth along with high unemployment, high interest rates, and high inflation. The economic stimulus provided by President Reagan's tax cut in August, 1981 - which scaled back marginal tax rates by 25 percent over three years - clearly set the economy on a growth trajectory. But it also set the national debt on a growth trajectory. The debt rose from $930 million in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988. Some observers point out that this doesn't matter because after the tax cut, government tax receipts doubled from about $500 billion to $1 trillion from 1980 to 1990, due to the higher income in a growing economy. But whatever the increase in tax receipts, it clearly did not come near to covering the increase in government spending - for which each party blames the other. And for a more current understanding of the concept of Trillions (and the impact of tax cuts for the very wealthy in a time of war spending), see this National Debt Graph. Note the trajectory of the debt, now going back UP under another GOP president, modeling the Reagan years...Indeed, it's risen dramatically, although the slope on this graph differs because it shows the debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, which is perhaps a better indicator of its real impact.
This website focuses on the connection between presidents and debt, showing that Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush have been the true champions at spending - so don't believe all that you hear about "Tax and Spend Liberals" ...it's the Conservatives, it would seem, who are the real kings of spending...
Finally, we're left with Tax Cuts ... the focus on cutting the tax rates at the highest brackets has resulted in a tremendous transfer of wealth over the past seven years ... this website by Citizens for Tax Justice is good: Year-by-Year Analysis of the Bush Tax Cuts Shows Growing Tilt to the Very Rich - it's pretty thick with numbers, so maybe one more picture is in order... on to the L Curve, so named because it actually looks like the mirror image of a captial L ... it uses a football field to show income disparities, placing the population along the football field yard lines, based on their annual family income, represented by the height of a stack of $100 bills. It remains relatively flat until the 95 yard line, when it begins to creep up, then it sky-rockets out of sight at the 99-yard line. So naturally, McCain's plan is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent!
According to the U.S. Treasury website, the following are recent annual additions to the U.S. public debt. * Fiscal year 2001 (begins 10/01/00) $144.6 billion The cumulative debt of the United States in the past 5 completed fiscal years was approximately $2,767.8 billion, or about 30% of the total national debt of ~$9.25 trillion. Wikipedia on United States Public Debt So, on to the bottom line - the conclusion of all these graphs and pictures: We are not poor. We just make poor choices when setting our priorities. As a body public, we've been deluded into thinking that we As long as those remain our national priorities, we will continue to have little free money to invest in Infrastructure that will pay dividends for future growth - they'll be no help from Washington for local economies under this leadership. We're too busy spending the money of tomorrow's generations on today's skewed priorities - debt spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. We've gone down the Rabbit Hole as a nation, and there's little that makes sense any more. Fiscal Conservatives have grown loopy with spending, Congressional representatives addicted to earmarks for their constituents - real financial libertines. And Social Liberals are starting to look like tightwads with public money, squeezing the budget so that they can find ways to pay for their beloved social welfare programs and progressive ideas. Which, by the way, are dwarfed by US defense spending, which now amounts to more than the rest of the world combined!
One last thing ... At current war spending levels - $10 Billion/month, which show no signs of abating, by the way - just one day of the War in Iraq costs $333 million dollars. At an average cost of $5 million per network (rough estimate for the City of San Marcos, Texas, a town of 50,000 and 25 square miles), as a nation we could build 66 city networks with just one day's war spending, and provide very cheap broadband for all 3,300,000 residents. Or if you prefer, 2,000 city networks for the cost of 30 days worth of war spending...and that's just the war costs, to say nothing of the oil spending and the tax cuts for the wealthy. Folks, in this country, we have the money to do whatever we have the will to do, we just consistently have chosen to spend it on other things like War, Oil, and Tax Cuts, under the leadership we keep electing. We have chosen not to invest in our collective futures by building new broadband infrastructure, among a host of other constructive purposes and paths we could have taken. We're a collective mess when it comes to decision making, I'm afraid to say. So don't believe it when people tell you "we can't afford it." They're really saying "We have different priorities."
Posted on March 10, 2008 at 09:33 PM | Comments (0) Ten Technologies to WatchStrap on your thinking cap for this one....here are ten emerging technologies, and I'd wager that you had not anticpated a one of them - OK, let's just say I had not. This kind of list is appealing because it stretches out the brain and gets one to thinking in a new way about the future. Check it out! Posted on March 05, 2008 at 08:39 PM | Comments (0) Built to Last or Last to Build?So many decisions face an official pondering the merits of a metropolitan broadband network. The bad news is that there are no easy answers to such a question. The good news is that there is a yet one more resource at hand to help one think through these issues. I recommend this 20-some-odd page white paper, Wireless Pittsburgh by The New America Foundation, putting the City of Pittsburgh under the microscope as an example. The author methodically works through the options and merits of different business cases, in sound and quantified ways. If you want to skip that website and Abstract, just go ahead and download the PDF here (you'll need to register on MetroNetIQ though). Highly recommended to put difficult topics in context! Posted on March 05, 2008 at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) On Structural Change, Part 5I've been busy making money, so haven't been able to post in a while. I thought I'd jump back in with another installment of the white paper On Structural Change. We're talking in this series of posts about dramatic change in the underlying structures that drive our economy and society - and to be sure, the discussion will tie in to Metropolitan Broadband. Start at Part 1 if you haven't read these yet - they're short and not too painful. Part 1 - Structural Change Argument Moving on then, the impact of structural change can be seen in more detail when we focus on the technology drivers that are a primary source of this change. We'll discuss technology drivers like standardization, open source, and mobility after the jump.
In the beginning, scientists tell us that early humans separated themselves from the rest of the animals through their use of technology, starting with sharpened stones they used as primitive axes, moving on to arrowheads and spearheads. Since that simple beginning, technology has steadily driven human progress as man employed more and more tools to make life easier/better. In that sense, technology has always been with us, characterized by the invention and use of tools to accomplish tasks better than before. But such progress hasn't always been pretty (see World War I, here , here and here), nor kind to workers, for that matter. Perhaps the most trumpeted example of cultural resistance to change can be seen with the Luddites in the 19th Century, who rejected new loom technology and actually broke apart the looms that threatened their livelihoods. Guess how well that tactic worked for them in the end ... Technology, Culture, and Change have always had an uneasy relationship, as each new generation has looked at new technology developments, sometimes with unease, but more often with excitement and anticipation. New technology carries the mantle of progress, whether we agree or not. So when technology took off like a rocket starting about 100 years ago, as science and engineering hit their strides and inventions related to electricity and telecommunications came of age, society hit the fast lane, so to speak. With first atomic energy, then electronics, we even added a new descriptor, now referring to "high" technology when there was an electronic component involved. And increasingly, there was something to do with electronics in nearly every technology advance. Hi Fi was part of High Tech too. But even as we entered this era of digital technologies with the advent of the integrated circuit in the 1960s, analog technologies managed to maintain a strong hold on our lives - as we observed above, the cultural transition to adopt technologies proved slower than the technological change that drove society's progress. We've moved ever more rapidly through stages as silicon chips became more and more powerful, cheap, and available. Chips are now everywhere, they're in everything, and with familiarity has come complacency - we hardly realize that they're there, but they are. Everything has become digitized, it seems. But though we have accepted chips into our lives and the changes have been evolutionary on the surface, the combined impact of digitization is revolutionary over the longer term. Our automobiles, for instance, now seamlessly merge mechanical and electronic technologies - to name but one formerly human function now guided by chips, computers take over for the driver when the brakes engage in an emergency. Like our cars, all of our old analog devices have come to incorporate one digital component or another to make them more capable and/or more efficient - but at all costs, technology is used to make products more appealing in a highly competitive marketplace. We now call these digitized devices "smart." As children born into this digitized environment grew up, they came to accept technology as a natural way of life. As digital natives, younger folk accept and incorporate technologies into their lives in ways that most of us older digital immigrants are incapable of doing (incapable of doing, that is, without great, conscious effort). And as the digital has become ever more commonplace, we face a double-edged sword: on the negative side, the pace of change now seems to quicken with each new year. On the positive side, however, providing a little balance, our experience lets us learn better ways of doing things - two current technology trends, somewhat interrelated, demonstrate this learning effect: Industry Standardization and Open Source. Industry Standardization. In the old way of doing things, it was a common rule of business for companies to keep their advantages close to their vest, seeking to advance a market lead over their competitors through such approaches. So naturally Steve Jobs, founder of both Apple, Inc. (formerly Apple Computer) and later, Pixar Animation Studios, chose to integrate his software and hardware innovations into a complete user experience with the revolutionary Macintosh - released in January 1984, the "Mac" was the first commercially successful PC to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI) rather than a command line interface. But while he had great success with the Mac and paved the way for the PC Era, one suspects that Jobs could have done much more had he only embraced the power of standards. His success with the Mac ultimately paled in comparison with the success of the IBM PC clone or IBM PC Compatible computer, which by virtue of being based on standards enjoyed the benefits of market economics, where industry standard design and common Microsoft operating system software provided high quality and low costs. Thus standardization allowed prices to drop steadily and the majority of the market went to the less elegant but much cheaper PC, relegating the Mac to a small but devoted set of enthusiasts. But even still, industry standardization is not for everyone. Clearly, it's still not for Apple, which is riding high again by repeating the non-standard route it used with the Macintosh a few decades later with the iPod and iPhone. By building exclusivity into product design and business process, the non-standard approach creates a boundary between the company and the outside world, which advocates say allows the proprietor to retain control over quality issues, making the non-standard approach superior (not to mention, keeping prices higher for longer for the successful company that enjoys a market lead and strong positioning). Despite the continuing attachment to a non-standard approach by companies like Apple, the virtues of industry standardization have become much better understood since the roaring success of first the PC, and now, IEEE 802.11, better known as Wi Fi, offers yet another example of the power of standardization. Perhaps the best example to contrast open and closed approaches to software development is to look at Microsoft, which keeps its source code close to its vest and enjoys a dominant position in the market. But there's a price to pay for such dominance: as products increase in complexity, product releases have taken longer and longer and bug eradication has become more and more thorny. In contrast, many point to Linux , the poster child for Open Source software development, and aver that Microsoft cannot match the benefits of having a far larger group of code developers work out bugs more quickly and completely. The success of Linux has spawned advocates of Open approaches in a number of areas, even to the point where we speak of "open" in other contexts, as with Open Source ecology and the Open content movement. What each of these uses of the "open" concept have in common is putting the stress on the benefits of decentralization, a key component of this white paper. As with standardization, skepticism to open approaches remains, though they're here to stay as challengers to the more dominant closed models. Networks. Telecom networks have come full circle. They used to be much less complex, requiring human operators in the middle to make connections between callers. Then, telecom networks helped to drive the computing industry by creating a market for ever more powerful "switching" devices, large computers that is, which took the place of human operators to connect callers to their parties. Expertise and innovation became a source of pride for telephone companies - indeed, Bell Labs was second to none in its heyday. No wonder telecom companies still believe strongly in their "smart" network approach. But along came the Internet, putting the intelligence out in the hands of the users on the edge with the Internet Protocol Suite, using TCP/IP. The wonder of the Internet was that a simple shared packet coding practice operated with a high degree of reliability. A dumb network, contrary to what one might think, actually proved more adept at getting a message through. David Isenberg, a former Bell Labs engineer, published a seminal paper in 1997 that best captures this distinction between smart and "stupid" networks - see The Rise of the Stupid Network. The World Wide Web built on this non-conventional viewpoint with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Uniform Resource Locater (URL), and the rest is, as they say, history. We're all now quite familiar with these three-letter acronyms, or TLAs. As the network transitions from a "smart" network controlled by a powerful network operator to a "stupid" network that acts as a tool to shuttle data packets around, the power shifts away from the network operator to the application provider and users out on the edge. But the owners of the networks, as we shall see in this paper, do not give up their control, rather, they hold on tight. Such resistance to change is the source of a growing conflict between telecom-centric "smart" network adherents and Internet-centric "stupid" network believers. Spectrum. Moving from wired to wireless, we encounter an aging regulatory methodology developed by the government to foster adoption of analog wireless technologies back in the early part of the 20th Century. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) was created in part to manage the commercial use of the electromagnetic spectrum, more specifically, those wavelength bunches used by analog radio and television broadcasters and two-way radio users. Analog wavelength management is much less precise than its digital cousin, which made spectrum a precious commodity and required a cumbersome government agency to ensure that operators could use wireless technologies without stepping on each other's toes and ruining it all for everyone. But with new technology, some believe that such governmental management has lost its relevance, has become outdated and does more harm than good, even arguing that the FCC now acts more as a government revenue producer than market enabler, as it auctions off wireless spectrum rights for ever greater amounts. For a deeper treatment on the changing face of spectrum management, I recommend this white paper from 2003, as well as this classic by former FCC staffer Kevin Wehrbach, Radio Revolution. (Both of these links will require you to register - just takes a moment!) The gist of these arguments is that technology has advanced to such a state that the devices on the ends of the network have become smart and can handle the management of spectrum usage to avoid interference far more elegantly than government regulators can. And these were arguments advanced 4-5 years ago. As this trend progresses, we see yet another technology-driven structural change underway. Mobility. The final technology driver that is helping to accomplish structural change is the growing momentum of mobility. The case for mobility is well-developed in another white paper I wrote nearly four years ago, March to Mobility, available for download (again, you'll need to register). As high technology grows ever smaller and more powerful and batteries get better and better, hi tech becomes portable. First, we saw desktops go mobile with lap tops and PDAs. And we see a similar progression among our mobile communication devices: we've gone from car phones to analog mobile phones to digital cell phones, and on to camera phones and now, smart phones. This past year, we saw the introduction of new dual-use smart phones that can operate on both cellular networks and Wi Fi networks, bringing more intelligence and potential to bear on the mobility question. These trends in computing and telecommunications that show more and more mobility fit under the neat label of Technology Convergence. And the ultra-mobile PC market may well bring in further change from the computing side. A great example of such convergence from the computing side is the EEE ultra-mobile by Asus, which I detailed in a January post titled New Year Brings Renewed Emphasis on Mobility. This device has the potential to be disruptive because it leverages cheap or free options: Wi Fi for access, Skype for VOIP telephony, flash memory in lieu of a hard drive and Linux for an operating system. - net / net, a device like this packs a wallop for a low price because technology has progressed so far and provided so many new options - in short, Structural Change. Next up, we'll look at the Consumer Impacts. Posted on February 25, 2008 at 03:33 PM | Comments (0) Peak Demand Response and InfrastructureBack in September last year, I started a conversation that has gone in interesting directions. At the Broadband Properties conference in Dallas, I attended a utility seminar where panelists talked about broadband and electric utilities, a pet cause of mine. (See Utility Forum Shows Multiple Broadband Approaches.) Among the many good panels that day was a group of three city representatives from Gainesville, Florida, home of the powerhouse University of Florida Gators. In many ways, Gainesville strikes me as similar to my hometown of Austin, host city to the University of Texas Longhorns, in as much as it's a university town where a major state school resides. But it's perhaps more similar to San Marcos, the mid-sized city that sits just south of Austin and is host to Texas State University, a very large state university and flagship of the Texas State University system. In fact, San Marcos is a closer match to Gainesville, given the relative sizes of the three cities (Austin 700K, Gainesville 110K, and San Marcos 50K). I've spent the past 18 months or so doing a deep-dive metropolitan broadband consulting project for the City of San Marcos, which I've discussed several times on this site (just use this site's search tool with "San Marcos" to learn more.) The discussion last September in Dallas involved the experience that Gainesville Regional Utilities, the city-owned electric utility, had in gradually extending a fiber optic network based on opportunities and demands from apartment owners and other interested stakeholders. Unexpectedly, my initial conversation with City Commissioner Ed Braddy that day has spawned an ongoing telephone conversation on the potential of metropolitan broadband, especially in mid-sized university towns like Gainesville and San Marcos. So I was pleased to see Ed author an intriguing Op Ed this past week - see Don't fight it, telecommute!. Ed comes at this topic from an interesting direction - traffic congestion is a big issue in any number of towns and cities, and it's an issue that is not going away. The challenge of physical transportation in any area is complex on several fronts. First, the infrastructure (i.e., roads and bridges) needed to accommodate growth are very expensive and require extensive advance planning and funding. Second, roads and bridges take a long time to build. Third, the traffic they bring with them is a major contributor to carbon-based air quality degradation, now coming under the broader heading of Climate Change. In a sense, we're all up against an infrastructure challenge where our old solutions don't work as well as they used to. We know we can't keep building roads until every city looks like Los Angeles, but we're not sure what our alternatives are. All the solutions that look at supply, in fact, tend to be very expensive. And as Ed makes his point, solutions that demand too much in the way of consumer behavior changes ultimately fail. But Ed makes an intriguing connection in this article, suggesting that his city give a second look to telecommuting as an alternative to relieve the burden on the city's streets and roads. Intriguing because Ed ties the potential of a broadband infrastructure to the problems associated with a transportation infrastructure. With a more holistic perspective, these two infrastructures can complement each other. Extensive and affordable broadband makes telecommuting a viable alternative with minimal changes to, even improvements on, the status quo of commuting to work five days a week. In a broader sense, by focusing on relieving peak demand (traffic congestion), instead of increasing supply (roads and highways), Ed is in good company. In fact, this approach is a growing trend when it comes to another kind of infrastructure: electric utilities are giving serious consideration to demand response solutions as a way to manage congestion in their electricity generation, transmission and distribution systems. Rather than continue with the old way of managing increased demand - increasing supply to meet that demand by adding power plants and expanding the electric grid - utilities are implementing solutions that enable them to work more closely with their ratepayers. By better managing not just how much electricity ratepayers consume (i.e., energy conservation) and where the power comes from (i.e., renewable energy), but also when the power is consumed, utilities can optimize their systems. By shifting electricity consumption away from the congested peak times that burden infrastructure to less busy times (i.e., peak shifting), managers are making more efficient use of a very expensive infrastructure. When you think about it, this approach is not unlike the innovations that Southwest Airlines brought to the airline industry either, when they adopted business practices that concentrated on filling every plane through variable pricing. Here is the network truism: Optimization in a network business involves full utilization of the network capacity, so attacking the peaks by shifting utilization and smoothing out the demand curve makes good business sense. In the electric world, utility managers are starting to catch on that demand response is a credible alternative to massive spending on large capital projects to build more power plants or transmission lines. It's an idea whose time has come. And why not? We need to look at old problems in new ways if we are to find a way around the complex problems that bedevil our modern society. By suggesting that his city be open to consider broadband as a complementary infrastructure to roads, Ed may have hit on an idea that provides a cost justification for municipal networks that dwarfs what we have been discussing so far. This is the essence of the Intelligent Community approach, which is the focus of a whole other article. Posted on February 15, 2008 at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) On Structural Change, Part 4In previous postings (here, here, and here), we tracked the development and evolution of distribution companies, which provided the valuable service of putting producers and consumers in touch with each other, not to mention putting all of us out in society together with the rest of us. We've never stopped talking and sharing, we just can't get enough of modern telecommunications. Then came the Internet and the World Wide Web, and the rules began to change. Now, communication of both voice and data could proceed around the edge, rather than going through the middle (and through the gatekeepers at the middle). But we're still at the very beginnings of these changes. Now this analysis turns to the broader scope of the economy, the world of business, and society at large and the argument is that recent changes have not just been on the surface, but have been more fundamental - structures have changed. That was Then, This is Now As these distribution networks evolved and developed, what was happening in the broader world of business and society? The discussion and charts below compare and contrast the worlds of the 20th and 21st Centuries in an attempt to demonstrate the realignment that has occurred in the structures and concepts that underpin the daily activities of our economy and culture. It's important to note at the outset of this analysis that we rely heavily on generalizations and observations of trends to make our observations. While we make the argument here that we crossed a bright line when we turned the corner into the new century, of course, adaptive changes in culture and society are gradual and the old continues to co-exist with the new in many cases. The Paradigm Shift: Looking at the old familiar through a new lens First, we've seen a significant change in the organizational paradigm that defines our lives - in the early 20th Century world of relatively static hierarchies, we could reliably predict that five years from now, much would be the same in our fairly structured and controlled lives. Any changes that did occur would be evolutionary. Not anymore. Today we face a world where dynamic networks hold sway, where life has become more and more unstructured and unpredictable. Change has become emergent, we don’t know where the next change is coming from, but we know it's coming. We’ve become more reactive to what we see happening around us, placing a premium on observation, analysis, and information processing and organization. As for our economy, in the first half of the 20th Century, we counted on a large industrial base to provide the engine for economic growth. Smokestack industries made heavy equipment and headlines. With the advent of the transistor and the integrated circuit in the 1960s and 70s, however, the Information Age was begun and the transition was underway to an economy more characterized by IBM and Microsoft than US Steel and Ford. But now we've moved even beyond those times, shifting from that older Information Age to the new Network Age, where companies like Google and Apple drive the discussion of how the Internet and mobile access with devices like the iPhone will change our lives in the coming years. How has this transition affected power and control? While it still holds true that core players act as insiders to attempt to set an agenda and drive mass consumption, we see more and more power shifting to the players out at the edge, where networked consumers increasingly determine exactly what they want and when they want it. While "hits" and "blockbusters" are still much in the news, they hold less sway; we now have more independent markets. Where we once had a nation that watched the same TV shows and listened to the same Top 40 songs, now we have niche markets of YouTube viewers and iTunes users, who load their iPods with exactly what they want and consume it on their own schedules. While we may still hear discussion of American Idol, "What's on your iPod?" is more likely to be heard than "What did you think of Sienfeld last night?" We have incredible freedom of choice, from customized Firefox browsers to TiVo watch lists, to NetFlix downloads. How is the world of business to react to such consumer liberation? Well, starting with strategy, one way to look at things is to contrast two popular games of strategy. The analogy has shifted. In the 20th Century, strategists could be compared to medieval kings, lining up their troops along a battlefront, as in the Western game of Chess, where a variety of moves and countermoves of pieces on squares played to a defined finish, Checkmate or Stalemate. A better analogy for strategy today is the Eastern game of Go, where players compete to cover a map of lines by placing beads on the intersections of those lines, but in this case, the map constantly shifts as alliances and territories transition - the game goes on without end, with the winners fading in and out. The premium in society and business may always have been on innovation, coming up with new ways of doing things, but where before it took years or even decades for dramatic change to occur, now that cycle has shorted to months and years. The impact of such churning cannot be underestimated. Where once we stood on terra firma, we now stand on a shifting deck underfoot; we all need to find our sea legs. The world of production has changed dramatically as well. Where high production costs in the 20th Century once led producers to invest heavily in planning, centralized production facilities, and complex distribution strategies, now, digital products enjoy next to zero cost of reproduction and distribution - the tables are turned. Consequently, one new strategy is to rapidly gain market share by introducing products in the beta stage of development, followed by further changes and price drops along the way. Another is to start out offering a service for free and then move the other way, charging a nominal monthly fee after the customer has grown accustomed to the service (i.e., the freemium model as practiced by Web 2.0 companies). Producers now must stress flexibility and local customization in order to compete for customer attention in crowded marketplaces. And what about financing? In the old days, even into the 1970s and 80s, large companies relied on bank loans, small companies on SBA loans, and credit was tight. Lenders could loan money on prudent risks and count on stable markets with long depreciation and product life cycles. But as the supply of money increased, lenders became more competitive and aggressive, and there was a shift to venture capital - in the old days of first the Information Age Boom and then the Dot Com Boom, the VCs took risks and many enjoyed big hits. But following the Dot Bust, investors became more conservative and company founders faced a drought of financing alternatives. They learned the virtues of self-reliance, eschewing financing that diluted ownership in the hopes of a big exit, whether buy out or IPO. They turned their focus to new 21st Century Internet models, which saw them keeping their costs radically low, maintaining ownership and control, and working first on gaining a loyal following and revenue based on such new concepts and tools as the Long Tail and social networks like MySpace and FaceBook. Instead of getting millions from a few investors, start-up entrepreneurs could get a few dollars from millions of consumers, while retaining ownership and control of their businesses. Finally, back then, both risks and risk management were different. Businesses tended to rely on expert opinions and long-term plans, and while taking big risks, they did so under what they perceived were much more controlled conditions. They took calculated risks and could afford to wait for their payoffs. Now, cycles are shorter, conditions are less predictable, and the nature of risk has transformed. The perceived risk in the heady days of the Dot Boom was missing the boat, so fools rushed in. But hindsight indeed proved to be 20/20, and the real risk turned out to be investing real dollars in business plans based on false premises. As fundamental assumptions proved wrong, billions in investments were lost. Once bitten, twice shy, investors first withdrew, then learned to look closer at concepts like the Wisdom of Crowds and portfolio management. We understand better the benefit of feedback loops that enable smaller, more incremental risks to test the market and provide more information, which in turn lowers risk and enables further investment. Risk will always be present, but alternatives for risk management have become more sophisticated, given our lessons learned and the potent new tools that risk managers have at their disposal.
Posted on February 14, 2008 at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) On Structural Change, Part 3In this series, we're reviewing the way we communicate and how private companies have both changed the communication landscape and made quite a good living by putting us all in touch, with each other and with the information and services we seek. It's a worthy endeavor to look at changes in this area ...when you consider all that we spend on telecom services and entertainment, to mention just the two most obvious ways that we use communication services, you realize that it's not only that these companies are significant players in our national economy, but also that the money we spend with them also constitutes a good portion of our household budgets and the services they provide comprise a key part of what we would call our quality of life. But communication in the Internet era has become more than services we buy from large companies... this network has grown to affect every aspect of a far ranging set of services and functions. Broadband has become vital infrastructure, like electricity. Given that new role as vital infrastructure, we must then see changes in this area as what we must call "structural" - they shake the foundation on which our modern society depends. In Part One, we set up the premise that the Internet and digital technology changes have changed the basis on which our economy and society operate. We used two poignant examples of how powerful the forces of change are - the rapid near-destruction of Encyclopedia Britannica and AT&T long distance - in their market niches, these were two venerable bedrocks of our economy and society for decades (AT&T) and centuries (EB), yet dramatic changes in structure led to their rapid demise. In Part Two, we began to look at all the analog services that rose up to connect people, starting with print services and moving on to telephony, cable TV, and cellular phones. In Part Three, after the jump, we continue to review the role of interaction between the core and the periphery, but we see that things begin to pick up when we transition from analog to digital tools and processes. The key aspect of this shift is the maturing Internet, the widespread penetration of cellular phones, and the march of every more powerful computers and storage. At the end of Part Two, we concluded: And one more thing to note at this point: remember the graphic above where the print-centric viewpoint of "subscribers" and "non-subscribers" was described? That becomes the perspective of the distributor: the world is divided into subscribers and non, and the rationale to generate revenue is to convert non-subscribers to subscribers...but from the perspective of all of us out on the edge, we are going about our lives and communicating away, much of the time around the edge in "word-of-mouth" activities. We only feel like subscribers when we have to pay bills or deal with the companies that give us these services. Otherwise, we're just humans living our lives. This is a key distinction that we'll bring up later in the analysis. Empowerment at the Edge In the early days of being on-line, back in the 1980s, the Internet was hardly the powerhouse that it is today. Simple community bulletin board systems (BBS) allowed communities to communicate using PCs hooked up to telephone modems - in essence, taking "word of mouth" on-line in the days before the Internet was officially in existence. This was generally manifested in a local community effort, because long distance telephone service was considered expensive. Soon, early Dial Up Internet access services offered by companies like CompuServe and America On Line (AOL) , also requiring a telephone modem and a phone line, gave wider access to something new called the World Wide Web - the "www" in all those website URLs.
We know now that one significant aspect of the new Internet and World Wide Web was that it was very democratic - anyone with a connected PC and an Internet access account from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) could bypass the traditional distribution services to gather information and communicate on-line. They could go around the edge instead of through the middle, although there wasn't nearly so much out there on-line as there is today. The next iterations of the evolving circle graphic thus show rings being added to the outer edge, in contrast to the ever increasing spokes of proprietary network service providers in the days of analog services. Simple websites, now derisively referred to as brochureware, were the norm in what was more of a fringe culture at first. In the early days of the Internet, most companies offered printed information with some graphics on relatively static websites. With limited use of graphics, and certainly no moving video to speak of, the speeds needed to make the Web work were not nearly as great as today. 28KBs dial up speeds (and ultimately, 56KBs), for instance, were seen as sufficient, although the Web did gain the nickname of "World Wide Wait" at the time, so things were admittedly slower than consumers would have liked. But users were still free to surf and experiment. Many feel the explosion of creativity that drove development of the Internet owes a good part of its success to the fact that while tools and a modicum of structure were provided, precious few rules told people how they could use this new medium, so they experimented and played around with it. Given it's "toy" status at first, the Internet failed to gain the attention of the large cable and telecom companies - sure, telephone companies valued Internet service, but they saw it as a source of enhancing revenue from their traditional core service, telephone lines, or POTS - plain old telephone service, because gaining access required a second phone line (or long bouts of busy signals on the primary line). Phone companies saw an opportunity for additional revenue by selling more than one phone line per household. They didn't gather the greater significance that the Internet would have (or if they did, they didn't act on it) - besides a few visionaries out there, none of us really understood the transformation that was underway, at first. That epiphany would occur later, as we painfully processed the Boom and Bust cycle at the end of the century and the beginning of the new century, only after broadband had firmly taken hold. So as dial up recruited early users and Internet culture began to form around the new technology, the next wave of technological advance to follow was to improve on the transmission of data, specifically to improve on the speed and convenience of the new Internet. The two early movers in this area were the cable TV companies and the telephone companies, who applied their respective business models and subscriber services to this new "telecommunications" service dubbed "broadband" Internet access. Cable television companies got an early head start as the first to realize that they could use their existing coaxial cable networks to offer an improved, faster, always-on broadband access service. Thus with the advent of cable broadband, the Internet gradually caught the market's imagination and began its rapid growth, even touching off the Internet Boom of the late twentieth century, aka the Dot-Com Bubble.
Telephone companies, late to the broadband game, made up for lost time in the early 2000s by offering service roughly comparable to cable broadband over their copper telephone wires, using a technology called Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line or DSL. They were able to convert their own dial-up customers, gain customers away from cable companies, and win customers altogether new to broadband by offering dramatically lower prices, bringing a form of competition to the emerging broadband marketplace.
And so with most broadband Internet service provided by either cable or telecom companies, a new way to communicate from person to person came about. Internet users figured out how to make use of the Internet in new ways in order to communicate with each other: through what came to be known as "peer-to-peer" services - P2P - files and messages zipped around the edge, as users took advantage of the ability to work with each other, away from involvement of content distribution companies. But it was no picnic, as incumbent service providers fought back. The digital rights management issue (DRM) was born after an upstart company called Napster gained great notoriety by giving users a program that enabled them to trade music files. By sharing their music, music companies claimed, the users were "stealing" music from the rightful owners and violating copyright laws. While recording companies won some court battles and defeated Napster in Round One of what appears to be a heavyweight title fight, P2P was here to stay. And so P2P progressed as new "edge" behavior even as Internet service access was still required by the old distribution companies. The steady growth of broadband market penetration and the growing number of services and variety of content available over the Internet continually raised the value proposition for this new medium, even as it challenged existing business models. Not to be left out, cellular telephone services saturated their markets for voice communication, and began to offer their own cellular broadband data services, including Internet communication, but also text messaging, ring tones, and other walled garden services. Touting a third generation of wireless technology (3G), cellular companies have aggressively promoted their services to access the Internet, but consumer adoption rates remain lower than anticipated. In part, that's due to service speeds that remain relatively low and slow deployment of the new 3G network gear - even if one can afford it, it's still not widely available except in major markets.
That said, cellular handheld equipment has grown more and more sophisticated and capable, with the new devices becoming known as "smart" phones. But as stated earlier, low bandwidth and relatively high costs have kept the subscriber rates for mobile Internet data delivered over cellular networks relatively low, with business customers being the principal users, although 2008 is anticipated to be the year of greater consumer adoption of smart phones, following the popular release of the iPhone in 2007 and subsequent releases by other manufacturers. Moving into the present, a few communities began experimenting with a new form of broadband access over wireless networks, Wireless Mesh and WiMAX services, collectively referred to as Wireless Broadband. Operating at speeds comparable to cable and DSL broadband, but having the mobility aspects of cellular data services, the new technology held promise but was not widely embraced by the dominant market players in data distribution (Cellular and Wired Telecommunications & Cable companies). While Wireless Mesh has seen its greatest adoption among a handful of pioneer public sector projects, covering parts of cities, or in smaller cities, the entire city, WiMAX has been deployed to date primarily by one company, Clearwire, whose founder is the telecom legend Craig McCaw. Clearwire has raised substantial capital, but as yet has limited deployment to date, primarily in Tier 2 and 3 cities like Waco, Texas.
As is readily apparent in the diagram above, in little more than 10 years, a variety of services based on Internet access came on the scene, and broadband experienced unprecedented adoption rates. And with the Internet, the connected consumer could do ever more, from accessing the world's information, to keeping track of current events, to making phone calls using the new Voice over IP (VOIP) technology, even to watching the ever more popular video-streaming short videos and downloading video DVDs from companies such as NetFlix. But yet more change was in store for the distribution companies that had grown large and powerful by providing a service that was unique and vital, and often offered with little competition. Fiber optics held great promise for nearly infinite bandwidth, denoted in the diagram below with the olive shading. While speeds had climbed into the 1.5 to 3.0 MBs among US broadband offerings (and much higher in advanced countries overseas), fiber offered connection speeds ranging from 100 MBs to 1 GBs ... a dramatic leap in productivity. But the cost to extend the fiber networks to the "Last Mile" (alternately called "fiber to the home" - "FTTH" or "fiber to the premises" - "FTTP") inhibited existing network owners - they needed to make a business case to shareholders on the relative merits of building a new fiber network for billions of dollars vs. leveraging the an existing and much depreciated asset - copper (DSL) or coaxial (Cable) networks - for far greater short-term profits and far less immediate capital expenditures.
Alone among the large telecom companies, Verizon began a large scale effort to string fiber line to its customers in a number of major markets, a multi-billion dollar gamble to provide new, cutting edge services. With the extension of fiber to every premises, many feel that the full potential of the Internet will be within reach. The dramatic increases in speed over cable and DSL broadband make fiber highly attractive, but the high costs and multiple coverage areas spell a long-term transition to the new technology. One last technology is worth noting in this short history. Cellular companies have been hard at work to develop a new generation of wireless technology, which they call fourth generation, or 4G. Expected in the latter half of this decade, perhaps in the 2010 time frame, 4G promises high data rates and mobility from existing cellular carriers. But the speeds and carrying capacity will not approach that of fiber. 4G is noted in the diagram below with a broader blue ring - an update to 3G from the earlier diagram.
Next up, Part Four, where we track coming disruptions to private distribution businesses and a potential future for the Internet and the various services we use to communicate and access content. Posted on February 04, 2008 at 05:06 PM | Comments (0) On Structural Change, Part 2In yesterday's post, we launched this series on the Structural Changes brought about by the maturing Internet and other advances in digital technology. Like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating pot of water, who fails to jump out until it's too late (that's an urban myth, by the way), as a society we fail to recognize the changes we are undergoing because they're both incremental and complex, and those who benefit from the status quo understandably resist change and work to maintain their hegemony. The human brain is still wired for evolutionary change, because dramatic changes always took a few generations to proliferate, giving us all time to get used to new ideas and new ways of doing things. Rapid, more revolutionary change then is quite simply disruptive, both to our ways of doing business and to our psyches. It gets irritating to learn a new way of doing things every few years, to replace equipment we just bought with new gear, to unlearn old ways and learn new ones. But, so it goes, because this is the world we live in today. Rapid changes in technology put pressure on businesses and societies to deal with new circumstances. After the jump, we move on to Part 2 of this analysis. At the end of Part One, we asked: How does the Internet achieve such a dominant influence in order to manhandle such business giants? And which industry or company is next on the hit list? Life at the Core and Life Out on the Edge Who's to tell, but we can make a fair wager that the next victims of structural change will come from the list of companies that make a living by distributing digital information, from radio stations to newspaper operations, from music companies to the movie business, from TV to telephones. The list goes on and on, as described in the next section. The nature of structural change driven by the Internet is to realign the rules of production and distribution. The changing rules demonstrate what we might call Technological Darwinism - the survival of the fittest in a rapidly changing economy. Pick any industry that relies on information production and distribution over private networks and you have an industry that is ripe for disruption, transformation or even elimination, all because of innovation and technological change brought on by the Internet. Because at the root of this structural change is the way we communicate with each other in our modern society, and increasingly we use digital tools and networks to communicate, because they make things easier and cheaper, a potent combination. And let's not forget that more often than not, digital is more fun and sexy! Smart marketers like Apple understand this and usher in consumer change by making products so attractive as to be irresistible (see iPod and iTunes). The communication we employ may be straightforward and direct, as with telephone calls or emails, or may involve the transfer of information through websites. It may involve commercial transactions as in marketplace activities like advertising, buying and selling, or it may involve distributing recorded data as entertainment (music and video). Or it may involve using the Internet to manage activities in the field or to monitor remote infrastructure. What all these activities have in common is that they're fundamental to the human experience of life on this planet. We communicate because we live complex lives in a society and we do things together. As we walk through this analysis, an important concept to note is that of core and periphery. We use the circle as a graphic illustrator of this concept. Individuals and groups out in society are seen as being located on the periphery, the outer edge of the circle in these graphics. Those in the middle are active in the distribution process, at the core. As distributors, they occupy a vital space when they facilitate communication between those out on the periphery through the distribution services they offer. The first networks in society were human-based, where information passed from lips to ears, what came to be known as "word of mouth." Think of the days of the Town Crier, back before a printing press gave power to the written word, and most were illiterate, at any rate. From this point forward, analog communication advances improved on word-of-mouth.
It wasn't long after the type was set and printing presses got inked up that distribution networks sprang up to communicate information over newsletters, broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers, and books. The first information distribution networks in the modern sense, then, gained great power by providing something everyone wanted but few could deliver: vital information printed on paper, providing a quantum leap in utility over the old oral tradition. To reach the many people out there on the edge with the printed word, one needed to go through the core company that had the capacity to print and distribute printed materials. Or, one needed to work with a mail service. Either way, one had to go through the middle to get to the edge.
Of course, from the distributors' perspective, the world was now divided between those who paid for the distribution service - subscribers, as it were - and those who did not.
And that's about as far as technology took us for quite a long time, until great leaps in innovation began to roll out in the early 20th Century, starting with the invention of the telephone and the company that developed to commercialize the technology, AT&T, aka "Ma Bell." With the advent of the telephone, two-way oral telecommunication was born - that's where we get the name - the "tele" stem means "distance." In a sense, people could communicate much as they did by "word of mouth," but over long-distances, assisted by technology. It's an understatement to say that this leap was a big hit - it was in fact transformative, as it changed the way that society functioned. AT&T was destined to grow into a corporate giant based on its near monopoly in telecommunications, which became such a vital service that in time Congress would pass a law to promote Universal Service, collecting a special fee from every phone user to subsidize service to hard-to-reach areas and populations. It had become unimaginable in modern society not to have this distribution service to go from one edge to the other, and people paid dearly for it, especially when the communication was over a long-distance or from country-to-country.
Broadcast media of commercial radio and television, subsidized by commercial advertising, ultimately led to the next significant fee-based distribution network in this analysis, the rise of Cable TV starting in the middle of the 20th Century. Originally designed for areas where broadcast signal strength was weak, cable television companies became strong distributors of entertainment content and the number of TV channels exploded from the small handful that had been available over the airwaves. Cable TV became a mammoth new industry, growing to rival telecommunications in size and revenue. In the sense that the communication ran in one direction out to the consumer, cable TV was more like the printed word, and less like telephone.
And so it went into the 20th Century. With the advent of analog pagers and cellular telephones, people could take messaging and their conversations with them as they went about their daily lives, first in their cars and then as equipment improved, as they walked from place to place. Into the 1980s and 1990s, cellular phones grew more and more popular. But as with the other distribution services above, the subscriber had to sign a contract for services and go through the powerful distribution companies. Relying on licensed radio spectrum, the cellular companies required massive capitalization, so only a few were available to offer services, but more competition was apparent in this market from the start than among the wired telephone and cable TV companies, which tended to enjoy more exclusive positioning in less competitive regional markets.
By now, one can see a pattern emerging. Large, well-capitalized distribution companies arise to provide distribution services that are highly valued by customers who cannot otherwise connect with each other or with the information they seek. In most cases, these companies managed to avoid significant competition in one or both of two ways. First, government-sponsored monopolies and permitting requirements raised the complexity of this business as well as the costs to compete. Second, market dynamics accomplished the same limiting function, raising various barriers to entry, such as the costs to dig and lay cable, the very high costs of gaining spectrum rights through FCC auctions, and the costs of supporting large bases of subscribers, from billing to customer service. About this point in the analysis, the conversion from analog to digital technologies began to offer cost advantages to the distribution companies, but the conversion was a double-edged sword. Even as digital efficiencies enabled cost reductions that made their businesses more profitable (e.g., fiber optic backbones reduced the cost of long-distance dramatically), the same digital efficiencies lowered the barriers to competition that had protected their markets. Advances in digital technology brought about the structural changes that we describe in this analysis, and the effects of such changes continue to unfold. And one more thing to note at this point: remember the graphic above where the print-centric viewpoint of "subscribers" and "non-subscribers" was described? That becomes the perspective of the distributor: the world is divided into subscribers and non, and the rationale to generate revenue is to convert non-subscribers to subscribers...but from the perspective of all of us out on the edge, we are going about our lives and communicating away, much of the time around the edge in "word-of-mouth" activities. We only feel like subscribers when we have to pay bills or deal with the companies that give us these services. Otherwise, we're just humans living our lives. This is a key distinction that we'll bring up later in the analysis. More next in Part 3, where we start to look at the impacts of the Internet and other digital advances... Posted on February 04, 2008 at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) On Structural Change, Part 1Three years ago (March 2005), just months before I launched UnwireMyCity.com, the antecedent to this website, I gathered my thoughts together on the changes that I was observing in technology and society, all driven by the maturation of broadband. I made a chart on Structural Change first, just to gather together all the changes (see it here in one of my first posts on May 19, 2005 - Planning Resources). I put some text around that as one of my first UnwireMyCity whitepapers, On Structural Change, available via this posting a week later on May 25, 2005 Affordable Wireless Disrupts Markets. I find it fascinating to read another link from that post on May 25, what turned out to be prescient thinking in an article I quoted three years ago, from a website appropriately titled Oligopoly Watch (recommended). Now there's a new threat. Broadband wireless allows companies that do not have a grid of cable or telephone lines serving each address to offer first Internet hookups and eventually other services including video and phone. This phenomenon is about to break into the mainstream, according to a Wall Street Journal article ("Internet and Phone Companies Plot Wireless Broadband Push", 1/20/05). Te improvement of Wi-FI and the next generation WiMAX technology is making it less and less expensive to set up these services, both in urban and rural locations. In fact, the city of Philadelphia and a number of others are rolling out low-cost municipal services, frustrated at the expense and slowness of the cable and phone companies to offer Internet services to any but affluent neighborhoods. The big phone and cable companies (Verizon, Comcast, SBC, and others) are anxious, because this move opens up even further their industries to outsiders. As fewer and fewer companies own the land lines, the business was starting to settling into a competition between two local monopolies, a cable company and a local phone company. In my own case, for example, I can choose between high-speed links between Verizon and Comcast. They are in competition, but it is a relatively contained competition. The pull of the status quo on society, the practical difficulties of launching new approaches to wireless broadband, and the power of large incumbent telecom and cable companies to resist such new approaches has combined to mitigate the optimism expressed in press clips from three years ago. But the fundamentals remain, even if the experiments have been less productive than originally expected. So, I've gone back to the white paper I wrote in the spring of 2005 to update it, given all that I've learned in the ensuing three years. Not surprisingly, there's much more to tell, more details and more nuances. But the gist remains the same. We are undergoing fundamental changes in our communications technology that will have far-reaching consequences. We still see Structural Change underway. After the jump, I offer the first part of a multi-part update to the 2005 white paper. On Structural Change and the Broadband Economy Close to a full decade into the new millennium, it's become more and more apparent that things will never be the same as they used to be. Change is on everyone's lips these days, especially among our presidential candidates in early 2008. Ever since the early days of the Internet nearly 15 years ago, the pace of technology change has crept up until it seems a non-stop constant now. Broadband internet drives much of that change: with its nearly infinite capacity of information and its near zero cost of distribution, broadband grinds away at the old way of doing things. And mobile broadband enables services heretofore impossible to offer. As the "First Mile" gets extended to more and more premises, the sinking costs of access and burgeoning capacity and utility of broadband guarantee continued rapid change, even promising a world where change is the new norm. And as the "March to Mobility" progresses, we become less satisfied with being tied to a wired connection, so expect the differences between "fixed" and "mobile" broadband to gradually diminish, as mobile catches up to fixed. But also expect new differences to appear, as fiber becomes the new norm of broadband, with the potential for Gigabit speeds that dwarf the Megabit speed limits of wireless. But cultural change acts as a drag on technological change, like a parachute dragged in the water behind a sail boat, known as a sea anchor to nautical types. As humans we struggle to accept the inevitable nature of change and grasp at how to deal with in manageable bits. Even as we do, we also cling to the hope that while change may be inevitable, it need not be so disruptive. We grow to miss the old ways of doing things, even as we become excited as old problems give way to new ones. The more things change, we begin to become more discriminating, even challenging whether change is in fact what we want. As our society grapples with the increasing pace of change and tries to make sense of it for our communal and individual lives, the very nature of change is morphing. The structures and underpinnings of our economic lives are shifting. This white paper explores the structural changes caused by the Internet and suggests that a paradigm shift is underway - a change in how we look at things provides leaders with a new way to cope with change and help move those they lead on to more effective adaptation. New ways of using technology can positively impact all of our lives and communities. And as the world evolves, the measure of humans and communities will become how well we adapt to change as much as what changes we choose to make. "Structural" Change What do we mean here by "structural change?" When the rules for doing business change, the structures that have supported the economy come under challenge and innovators begin to compete in different ways. The nature of competition changes and slowly (or in some cases, suddenly) those who do not or cannot adapt become less competitive and their influence wanes. We see long-established companies that we once considered the bedrocks of our economic system stumble as they try to adapt to the changes brought on by the ever-expanding and robust Internet. And we see some icons fall out of view altogether, with more to come. Consider just these two examples - Encyclopedia Britannica and AT&T - venerable companies with remarkably different outcomes in the past few years: one all but vanished and one that underwent dramatic reinvention and resurgence, both in the space of but a few years. * Reference Information: Encyclopedia Britannica was one of the first to go, as the Internet with its fluid information management capabilities made irrelevant this century's old information publication. Microsoft, the giant killer, put the printed word onto proprietary CDs and software when it launched Encarta nearly 10 years ago. In the late 1990s, Microsoft bought Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia from Macmillan and incorporated them into Encarta. Thus the current Microsoft Encarta can be considered the successor of the Funk and Wagnalls, Collier, and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias. None of these formerly successful encyclopedias are still in print, being unable to adapt to the new market dynamics of electronic encyclopedias.Wikipedia on Encarta But even that move by Microsoft was rather quickly supplanted in the early years of the new century by the open-source, web-based emergent phenomenon, www.Wikipedia.com. Neither hard copy references (annual updates, anyone?) or software releases have been able to compete with Wiki-based software and open-source content contribution that puts the world’s information at your fingertips, updated in real time (68K+ entries on Encarta, 2.2M+ on Wikipedia). Visit any library and notice the banks of computers that have replaced the old card catalogues. Score one for the Internet, which has made traditional competition in reference information irrelevant. * Long-Distance Telecommunications: Long-Distance is nothing like it was a generation ago, when it was a high-priced service - it barely exists today. Score one for fiber optics whose nearly infinite capacity of bandwidth drove long-distance prices to the floor, to the advance of cellular phones, whose mobility has become a requirement for modern communication, spurred on by the national calling plans that remove distance from the pricing equation, and to Voice over IP (VOIP), which incorporates long-distance as part of voice telephone service. The giant telecom monopoly AT&T enjoyed near exclusivity in the lucrative long-distance business, but then underwent a break up ordered by Judge Green in 1984, a monopoly in need of reform. So far was the fall that a couple of decades later, SBC, one of the most healthy of the post break-up "Baby Bells," leveraged technology and its own business savvy to swallow not only its old parent AT&T, renaming itself after the acquisition was completed, but also several of the other Baby Bells. Having put much of the old company back together again, but as a largely deregulated telecommunications powerhouse this time, AT&T now relies more on Internet service revenues than long-distance service revenues. How does the Internet achieve such a dominant influence in order to manhandle such business giants? And which industry or company is next on the hit list? Part 2, coming up ... Posted on February 03, 2008 at 01:04 PM | Comments (0) Infrastructure Gets Some Attention, It Deserves Much MoreWhen dynamic leaders like Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger speak, we should sit up and take notice - do ya think? Together with Gov. Ed Rendell, these two posted a letter to the Editor in today's NY Times, entitled A Plea for More Federal Dollars to Build America, where they make the plea for federal involvement and leadership, but also state their plan to shine a light on the problems and issues of infrastructure in the near term. Yea!!! I wrote about infrastructure in a previous post this week, citing the Bob Herbert column that these guys respond to (see Infrastructure - yawnnnnnnnn....boring, but vital). We're in search of leadership on so many fronts in this nation, and we need FEDERAL leadership most of all, for when it comes to infrastructure, there are limits to what states and cities can do. I'm not saying that they can't still do much more, but the federal government has been and is absent on this issue and we're way past time for the Feds to step up and provide some over-arching leadership to point us in a national direction to repair and rebuild our physical infrastructure. Let's hope that the issue of infrastructure gets attention in the presidential campaigns. And in today's world, that infrastructure must include broadband as the backbone of telecommunications in the 21st Century. How can it not? After the jump is the full text of their letter. Letter Published: February 1, 2008 To the Editor: Re "Investing in America," by Bob Herbert (column, Jan. 29): Mr. Herbert is right to call on the federal government to take a stronger leadership role in meeting our nation's infrastructure challenges. We recently announced the formation of Building America's Future, a nonpartisan coalition that will fight for exactly this goal. As state and local leaders, we are intimately aware of how critical infrastructure is to ensure our nation's economic health, keep our families safe, and create vibrant and sustainable communities. Yet while states and cities have significantly increased infrastructure spending in recent years, federal spending has been flat. Three out of every four infrastructure dollars now come from states and cities. In the coming months, we will put a spotlight on the nation's infrastructure shortfalls. Our country needs a new, independent approach to infrastructure, one that provides sufficient financing and weighs projects based on merit, not politics. We hope that federal leaders will join us in making this a reality. Michael R. Bloomberg Edward G. Rendell Arnold Schwarzenegger Harrisburg, Pa., Jan. 31, 2008 The writers are the mayor of New York and the governors of Pennsylvania and California, respectively. Posted on February 01, 2008 at 05:42 AM | Comments (0) When a Problem Comes Along, You Must Whip ItWhen a problem comes along now whip it You got problems? We got solutions ... yet another thing the Web is really really good at is putting together people and ideas, in the end, isn't this what problem solving is all about? Where do we go for cutting edge problem solving? Where else, but Monterrey, CALIFORNIA!! Check out this website, which makes it their overarching goal to solve problems...on Technology, Entertainment, Design, thus, TED - see About TED. TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind. Several influential members of the burgeoning digerati community were also there, including Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand. But despite the stellar lineup, the event lost money, and it was six years before Wurman and his partner Harry Marks tried again. This time, the world was ready and the numbers worked. TED has been held regularly in Monterey, California, ever since, attracting a growing and influential audience from many different disciplines united by their curiosity, open-mindedness, a desire to think outside the box ... and also by their shared discovery of an exciting secret. (TED was always an invitation-only event; it never had an advertising budget or a PR campaign.) Posted on January 29, 2008 at 08:16 PM | Comments (0) It all Starts with ScienceLife on this planet has become so complex, it's impossible to lead others into the fog of the future without a good understanding of the principles of science. Otherwise, one risks stepping of a cliff in the dark, like taking a walk in the woods at night without a flashlight...not altogether the best of plans. I received two great books for Christmas, which by now I've had time to wade into. I highly recommend each one, for different reasons. I've added them to the list of books on this site, here. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier, a science writer by trade who takes on the task of putting together the Basics that all should know in order to be scientifically literate. Science Illiteracy is a challenge for our nation, it seems, as the masses blissfully grow less and less aware of more and more, even as the experts learn more and more and in the process realize they know less and less. Phewww! Nevertheless, this book is a great one to have on the shelf; having read through it, you will then have a handy reference because there's no way to keep all of this knowledge at the tip of your tongue. Highly recommended. After the jump, I've captured just a few of the memorable quotes on pages I dog-eared while reading... First, from Bill Bryson ... Chapter 8: Einstein's Universe. p. 122 You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame ... potential energy - enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out. Keep that in mind the next time you feel powerless. Talk about living up to your potential - what a challenge. Chapter 9. The Mighty Atom p. 134 They [atoms] are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. Makes me feel one with the universe, how about you? and in the same chapter p. 138 [Rutherford, winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry] wasn't even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance, he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring....Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations. But not that tenacious, apparently...In the beginning, Rutherford worked on radio waves, with some distinction ... but gave up when he was persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future. I'm glad there were plenty of others to pick up where Rutherford left off. I draw inspiration from this and myriad other examples in this book, because the big leaps in knowledge tended to come from either accidents or from those "unorthodox explanations." We tend to grow comfortable with our status quos, it seems, and progress only comes when we are willing to shed our current realities in exchange for something better, if something at once weirder and harder to stomach. Change is not for the faint-hearted, it seems. And from Natalie Angier, a good joke.. I offer up these excerpts to encourage you to review what it is you think you know, and all that is out there that you may have forgotten since you were actively involved in formal education. There is so much to know in order to be able to put things in context and find new ways of doing things. And, I'll close with one of my favorite lines from a comedy album I listened to while a freshman at Rice University in 1975 (usually, I'll admit here, with some illegal smoke circling in the air above me and my friends in the dorm room). Posted on January 26, 2008 at 09:52 AM | Comments (0) Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the CurtainEarlier this week, with MetroNetIQ approaching its 2nd Anniversary in this current site design, I decided to update some categories (because its the New Year and as part of a 2-year upgrade, I decided to add a "Going Green" subcategory, among other things). But when I rebuilt the site, I encountered some formating bugs... So now I've got a snafu on the right side of this website and my web master, ZilkoWeb (a very skilled and kind gentleman, Steve Zilko is a whiz if you need a web developer, BTW), is going to address it, but he's busy on a deadline till the weekend...so in the meantime, I feel like I'm walking around with mustard on my upper lip, like I have a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe... Please tolerate our mess and look beyond the temporary, slight cosmetic ugliness...in other words, please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain... Posted on January 16, 2008 at 06:03 PM | Comments (0) The Party Never Ends ... Cartoon LemonadeI like this cartoon, and I really like this Robert Earle Keen song - great lyrics. Its Main Street after midnight just like it was before When handed lemons, I believe that real leaders are the ones you will see making lemonade, not bitching about getting lemons instead of chocolate, like the predecessor had. Still with me? Let's see over the coming months how our leaders-to-be make lemonade out of news that is getting ever more prevalent. The fact is, our economy is hitting some limits, as is our climate. Something's Gotta Give, like the movie of the same title. Outside the excited miniature world of "cool Hi tech stuff" covered in earlier posts on this site (here, here and here), I think it's time to roll out something I've been sitting on for a couple of weeks. I first came across this compelling little video on New Year's Day.
The Story of Stuff tells a story about the Material Economy, documenting its five stages: Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption, and Disposal. All that transpires to help us live the way we do is something we scarcely stop to think about here in the US, even as we remain extremely focused on our HyperConsumer lifestyles. The trash man comes on Friday morning and carries away my garbage..."For all I know (or care), it gets zapped by a ray gun," most seem to say by their inattention to the details and what they mean. Yet the message of this little cartoon was so compelling, and so in line with my world view, but at the same time, such a downer, that I quietly filed it in the stack of to-be-published-later blogs. I also wanted to give it some time to stew and to chew on how to put it into context. But look what's transpired in the days ahead... The very next day, author Jared Diamond penned this piece in the NY Times, What's Your Consumption Factor?, which echoes the sentiments expressed in the animated video. The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world's other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1. The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does. "Is the universe/God trying to tell me something?" I wonder. At some point, the rational actor stops to ponder, one would think, whether or not our current lifestyles here in the USA are sustainable. But, let's face it, who wants to be killjoy that delivers this message. Who wants to play the role of Eeyore, the sad sack who turns off the lights and sends everyone home, shouting "PARTY'S OVER, FOLKS, TIME TO GO HOME." I seem to remember a certain speech by Pres. Jimmy Carter, delivered in his trademark cardigan sweater, urging us all to conserve. That sure worked out well for him - NOT. We're not good at this. Let's face it, Jimmy's National Malaise diagnosis never stood a chance against Ronnie's Make America Great Again message. Nor, did Mondale's candidacy, whatever it was about, have a prayer against Reagan's Morning in America. Looking back, was it the message, or the messenger? When is optimism misplaced? Now it's 2008, a generation later, and we still face the same issues, punted down the road from president to president. Will it be Mitt Romney who speaks straight talk to us all? Probably not. In his speech at the Detroit Economic Club, Mr. Romney took Washington lawmakers to task for being "disinterested" in Michigan's plight and imposing upon the state's automakers a litany of "unfunded mandates," including a recent measure signed by President Bush that requires the raising of fuel efficiency standards..... ...Even though he left the state decades ago, he has pledged to make Michigan his special focus if elected president, and he has set himself up in contrast to Mr. McCain, who has said he is merely being candid in acknowledging the economic shift that has affected the state so harshly. "I'm not willing to sit back and say, 'Too bad for Michigan,' " said Mr. Romney on Monday. " 'Too bad for the car industry. Too bad for the people who've lost their jobs. They're gone forever.' " Drawing a rare moment of enthusiastic applause from the students, Mr. Romney said, "I will not rest if I'm president of the United States until Michigan is brought back." McCain and Romney Battle for Lead in Michigan, January 14, 2008 The road goes on forever and the party never ends. Hello, Mitt, I have a Honda Civic Hybrid that gets 40+ MPG today, and 35 MPG is a low bar and 2020 is a full 12 years away. That's not a tough enough goal. The fact is, the Big Three auto makers chose to make SUVs with high profit margins years ago and killed off efforts to make hybrids, and to make matters worse, killed off efforts to raise the CAFE standards. They made their bed, so to speak. So now, they're losing market share and heading the way of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Do Do bird - to oblivion, in other words. But are they going to sleep in the bed they made for themselves and their shareholders and employees? No, when viewed through the pandering lens of the candidate, the problem was not the Free Market at work, no, the problem was, and is, government regulation. Give me a break. That's called an Excuse, it's called Denial, and it shouldn't have a place in a conservative's speech. That strikes me as Cognitive Dissonance. I'm confused, or maybe "conservative" doesn't mean what I think it means, a la Princess Bride. Also in today's paper, Americans Cut Back Sharply on Spending We are restructuring and undergoing major shifts. Is this just a temporary phenomenon, or a sign of things to come? And consumer confidence, an important barometer of economic health, has plunged. Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, says consumer satisfaction with the economy has reached a 15-year low, according to the firm's polling. Even wealthier consumers, who were seen as invulnerable to rising gasoline prices and falling home values, are feeling the squeeze. "People are clearly concerned that we are headed into a recession," said Stephen I. Sadove, the chief executive of Saks Fifth Avenue, the upscale department store whose runaway growth throughout much of the year slowed markedly in December. Clearly, the presidential candidates must do something to "get the economy back on track!" But what if a rail has gone missing? The road goes on forever and the party never ends. So what will scaling back look like, when it happens? Will we ever stop consuming? Can we do that and not have a catastrophic economic consequence? Can our country ever put itself on a diet and exercise program without the threat of a coronary to motivate it? I haven't had a whole lot of success in my life at personal discipline, so I'm not optimisitic - I think it runs counter to human nature, and I think that America's expanding waistline is a better indicator than anything...and I don't see too many leaders stepping up to give us the medicine we so desperately need, the truths we need to listen to. I think that more and more we'll have to look at different ways to do things. But I'm afraid that election cycle after election cycle will give the advantage to the snake-oil salesman who preaches that we can have our cake and eat it too. "We can be great again," will always have resonance in a campaign, because an aging beauty likes to hear she still has what it takes to rev a guy's engines. A guy likes to know he can still compete against the younger studs on the soccer field, despite his bad knees. "We don't have to scale back" will always have resonance, because, in this country, we like to eat our cake. It's one of the things we've gotten terribly good at doing. And people like to do what they are good at, especially when it's so much fun doing it. We're going to need a We need a different party to replace the one that My hope, and I cling to it, is that we'll be able to focus on the positive and focus on something else we're good at besides consuming. We'll be able to gain efficiencies through technology - like metropolitan broadband - that end up buying us some time to restructure our economy away from reliance on ever expanding consumerism, which has zero chances, I believe, in being sustainable. We're hitting real limits and the past seven years, no, make that the past 50 years, start to seem like the party that would never end. But after this party does end, and all parties must end at some point, so if even the Post WWII Economic Boom is in decline, we should imagine that one, folks - the hangover that follows is going to be a doozy for us all. We need something better and different to replace what we are losing. And that, I'm afraid, is one helluva basket of lemons to be handed. Lemonade, anyone? I'll take mine with a little Jack Daniels, thanks...let's start a new party to replace the old one. Let's reshuffle the deck. UPDATE JAN 27. The Story of Stuff is getting broader exposure, it seems. Daily Kos, a highly popular website for progressive politics, has just posted a discussion and came to many of the same conclusions I did. But they are more optimistic than I was in this original post. The comments at the end of the post are especially interesting (357 as of this update). Recommended reading. With the help of producer Louis Fox and artist Ruben DeLuna at Free Range Studios, Annie turned her one hour talk into a twenty minute film. A film that's been watched by more than one million unique viewers. A film that's available on line and which you can watch by clicking the picture above. If you haven't seen the film go now. Seriously. Right now. You'll be glad you did. Because this short film is as direct, effective, and eye-opening on consumer society as An Inconvenient Truth is on climate change. As we worry about the current economic downturn, even the way we attempt to measure our problems reflects this distorted shopaholic culture. Take a primal forest, kick out the people who have lived there for generations, cut down the trees, slice them into pieces, soak them in toxic chemicals, turn them into disposable products, and ship the discarded remains off to a landfill. On the business page of your local paper or the glitzy stock channel on your television, each of those steps has the same name: growth. What's a recession? Lack of growth. How do we end a recession? Stimulate spending on more disposable items, so we can buy more disposable goods, so we can cut down more forests, so we can have more... growth. But if the first part of Annie's film is devoted to describing the problems of our current unsustainable culture of disposable goods, it's the final part that deserves special attention. Rather than stopping with the bad news, Annie shoots straight on into the good -- we can change. The most engaging part of her description of our society is that everyone can find their place in the flow, and the same dynamic means that everyone is positioned to help change how things work. Environmental issues, social justice, and economics all play into making the change toward a fair, sustainable society. There are as many ways to insert yourself into the process as there are products on the shelves of the local big box store. Posted on January 14, 2008 at 01:46 PM | Comments (0) Look Before You Leap, Part 6I posted Part 5 in this series on December 22, which seems like a year ago...not really, just my first chance to use this joke that never gets old. :) The holidays are already fading into a blur, and I'm coming to the realization that Regular Time has returned. But with a twist. We have a brand new year to work with. This is exciting. And that's how champions and change agents should look at the potential of metropolitan broadband. A project of this type offers a tremendous opportunity to focus a constituency on a new way of looking at things, a new way of getting work accomplished. Here's a recap, in case you missed the first five parts of this series...first, I proposed a sliding scale where multiple dimensions of decision-making help a leader faced with a difficult decision to break down the elements that drive his/her choices. Not unlike the way a computer audio control breaks down the components of sound to let the audiophile tune to just the right sound quality.
In previous posts on this topic (See Part 1 - the Background: Disruptive Change, Part 2 - the Set Up: Framework for Decision-making, Part 3 - Foundational Perspective, Part 4 - Organizing System and Part 5 - Functional Process), I described a changing world that is increasingly networked and tied together and oriented around digital technology. I argued that to make local changes to accommodate and leverage these new opportunities and this changing landscape, we're faced with decisions and analysis along several dimensions (as on the sliding scale graphic above). So, on to the next element, Part 6 - a Holistic, Comprehensive and Sustainable Solution...
4.1. Moving from Applications (Point Solutions) to Networks (Holistic Solutions) - Traditionally, city departments have built proprietary solutions into their individual budgets and the applications came with a communication platform bundled in. The result has been a system where the vendor holds leverage over the public sector consumer, which manages an increasing array of proprietary devices and software applications that do not work together, require expensive upgrades, and have differing legacies and shelf lives. In contrast, moving to a general purpose communication network that supports any IP-based application gives the public sector consumer much better leverage over vendors, where standardized products can be interchanged and no one vendor has an exclusive. 4.2. Proprietary to Standards-Based - We've learned a considerable amount about the value of standards over the past century. In the 1800s, it was common for an artisan or craftsman to work alone and make unique goods. Starting with Henry Ford's innovative ideas on mass production, the business world began to understand the efficiencies and benefits of reaching economies of scale. The technology era went a step further by gathering together industry leaders to come to agreement on production standards, thus allowing products to interact efficiently, providing consumer benefits and stimulating demand. That moves the whole industry rapidly through the product adoption cycle and lowers costs of production as cost efficiencies are achieved, creating a self-sustaining virtuous cycle, a great outcome if you can get it. The best example in our field of this phenomenon is the successful work of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, which gave us among other popular standards, IEEE IEEE 802.11a,b, g and soon, n and s - standards that support Wi Fi and mesh networks - and IEEE 802.16d and e, standards that support WiMAX. I put together this graphic a few years ago for a client to demonstrate the concept of a virtuous cycle based on standardization and collaboration.
4.3. Moving from Service Purchases to Infrastructure Provisioning - The move to digital platforms and the automation of manual processes raises the profile of the network on which services are delivered. As the network becomes a more critical component for the city, the city can begin to look at provisioning services over its own network infrastructure as a compelling and valid alternative to buying network services by-the-drink, gaining not only lower costs over time, but also greater security. Until the advent of relatively cheap new equipment and unlicensed spectrum, which together keep the costs of such networks low, entry by the public sector was simply not an available option. This approach of owning the network infrastructure is a significant departure from tradition, but should be viewed no differently than owning other critical infrastructure that the city uses to provide itself services, such as the water and electric utilities, and any fiber that it owns. Next, we'll tie all this together to show how this methodology can lead to less anxious, more sound decision-making when faced with technology change. Posted on January 02, 2008 at 08:35 AM | Comments (0) Best Blogs of 2007Here's a good site to bookmark and go to when you have a few moments. I plan to work through this list of the best blogs of 2007 - my first New Year's Resolution. How about you? Jon Swift: Best Blog Posts of 2007 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves) Posted on January 02, 2008 at 06:27 AM | Comments (0) Look Before You Leap, Part 5
In previous posts on this topic (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), I've described a changing world that is increasingly networked and tied together and oriented around digital technology. I argued that to make local changes to accommodate and leverage these new opportunities and this changing landscape, we are faced with decisions and analysis along several dimensions, which I mapped on the sliding scale graphic above. I have only to describe a few days in my life to make the example. * "Long distance" has effectively disappeared as a telecommunications term when I can talk to my former executive in Paris over Skype with crystal clear sound, no latency, and at no cost, as I did yesterday morning. We still have to coordinate because of time difference, but that's not going away as long as we live in different spots relative to the sun. For those of us who have already made adapting our lifestyles to use these new tools a habit, life has indeed become quite different than it was before the Internet was available. In essence, there's a freedom of action that comes from using these technologies, which can be looked at as new tools. One of my big challenges is in encouraging others to make these changes so that they keep up with me (I still can't get my old buddy in Rome onto Skype, my wife has resisted getting a digital camera, but that will soon change - come on, Christmas! - and the whole purpose of this site is to encourage change). So while in Part 4 we examined new potential in systems, featuring a move towards Open, Web-based systems, in this analysis, we now turn to Process, which explores how we use systems to accomplish work and meet our goals. I'd suggest there's potential change on at least five dimensions when we look at process: 1. Analog to Digital - how people use technology and tools More after the jump.
3.1. Moving from Analog to Digital - One of the primary changes that we face in the environment today is technology driven. We're transforming into a digital society, and that involves moving from an Analog world to a Digital world. It involves learning a new language, the language our kids are speaking as Digital Natives. (See a post I wrote in April Town to Gown - and all points in between for more on the Digital Immigrants / Digital Natives meme). The Analog world has people moving information manually - processing paper documents by hand - where the Digital world uses technology to streamline processes. The Analog world has people picking up the telephone to convey information, the Digital world amends the process until often the human interaction of transferring information is removed altogether, leaving the humans to do a higher value activity. (See also these recent posts: From Analog to Digital - What a Long Strange Trip, and Digital Adolescents, Stuck in Digital Puberty). 3.2. Moving from Manual to Automatic - The Latin stem for the word "manual" refers to using one's hands. Manual processes involve a human being touching an object. In looking at how we get things done in any organization, it's important to consider that each one of those manual processes is subject to a cost and is prone to human error. Ultimately, we can't change everything over to automatic, but much of what we call progress has involved taking human touches out of processes. We saw it in the move from craft shops to factories, the primary innovation of the 20th century. In this new century, we'll see more and more process reform, because reducing time and costs makes more things possible. This is the nature of improved standards of living. From a city perspective, reducing costs in this way offers the opportunity to manage growth without adding more labor costs to the budget - in essence, keeping taxes low and spending citizen's money more wisely. Full leveraging of the Internet has only just begun, because it's such a new tool and we don't fully understand how we can use it to move away from old ways of doing business. But rest assured, many more efficiencies lie in this direction if we will keep on looking. 3.3. Moving from Fixed to Mobile - This transformation is best imagined by thinking of a plug into a wall socket and a hand-held device. This is moving from a telephone at your desk to a telephone on your hip. This is moving from a radio plugged into the wall to a radio powered by batteries and plugged into your ear. It is the moving from the world of the desk phone, the desktop PC, and the clock radio to the cellphone, the laptop, and the iPod. We started this transition when we put radios in our cars and trucks. We finish this transition when we carry those devices on our persons, wherever we go. Full mobility involves changing our business processes, because we can get everything we need, wherever we are. We no longer have to move around to access information, whether it is out on the Internet, or out in the field. With mobility, we're freed from the constraint of location. This change is bigger than most think, because we're used to having to move our bodies to get what we want. As climate issues gain more attention, look for more people to consider moving information over broadband networks instead of moving bodies in cars, trucks, and airplanes, burning fossil fuels, and polluting the air. (See the 2005 MetroNetIQ White Paper March to Mobility for a fuller discussion on this inevitable trend.) 3.4. Moving from Coercion to Collaboration - In the old days, employees did what they were told and if they didn't, they were fired. That's the essence of coercion, gaining one's way through aggressive threat. Later as bureaucracies ossified and became less effective, employees who would otherwise be fired were overlooked, disciplined in some manner or transferred to another task where they could cause less harm. Otherwise, the same model was in place - top-down coercion by management to force compliance to a set standard of performance. Sure, management tools are available to make the model work better, with limited success: annual performance reviews for feedback, raises in salary or wage (or more likely, withholding of raises), bonuses, training, junkets, and award ceremonies. All these formal mechanisms were devised to oil the cogs in the Coercion Machine and keep it running. We see this model continue in many, if not most businesses and organizations. Old habits die hard, but more and more, we see another model on the rise. In the new collaboration organizational model, workers share responsibility for outcomes and work much closer together. Professionalism is expected equally from managers and those managed. Work practice may be far less formal, but even with all the informality, more is expected. Independence is demanded by employees, who see themselves as better equipped than their bosses to know what needs to be done, since they're right there on the spot, where the action is, so to speak. In a more dynamic economy, jobs come open more often, and good employees recognize that they have more freedom of movement. The good ones are more likely to move on if not treated well, but if they're happy in their job, they'ill stay and become ever more valuable. Training is not so much a perk as a necessary expense, given the increasing complexity that technology brings. Having invested so much in their employees, and likely relying on fewer employees to do more, employers are eager to see that they stay on the job and remain productive. As tasks become more unique, problem-solving skills are more valued. In a complex work environment, it often takes multiple perspectives and skill sets to solve a problem, and this is especially true in smaller organizations, where fewer employees mean everyone wears multiple hats and carries greater responsibility. The only way this model works is if everyone works well together - if they collaborate, which when broken down means "to work together." This aspect of change has a better chance of being embraced if there is a move towards cultural transformation or if there is intense pressure to reduce labor costs. For this, of all the dimensions of change, involves cultural change, which is always slower than one would think. So, the chang | ||||
