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 Monday, December 9, 2002
Highways a gift state can barely afford - Uncle Sam built road system; state struggles to fix it. OLYMPIA -- Imagine that your rich uncle gave you a really, really nice car and you built your life -- professional and personal -- around it, only to discover that just replacing the tires would cost a month's pay. [Home]
Nice metaphors and quite true. The interstate system is falling apart, affectig interstate commerce to a large degree. We defintiely need good roads for national security reasons, right? 11:16:03 PM 
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Wired News: Saving Your Bits for Posterity. That's the idea behind MyLifeBits, a new Microsoft research project that aims to record the essence of a person's life on computer disks: every photograph snapped, home movie filmed, Web page browsed, e-mail scribbled, phone call made or bill paid. [Tomalak's Realm]
Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy but this scares me. DO I want MS to have ALL the details of my life availbale in databases? What about security? What could be deposed in a court case? I imagine the tabloids would have a field day if they could get into certain people's memories. Nothing can be made absolutely secure. Besides, I am sure that the government will have a nice back door into the database. The Patriot/Homeland Security Act already gives them the right to search such databases, sometimes without the knowledge of the owner. 10:46:42 PM
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Useit.Com: In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter. Much of the Harry Potter books' charm comes from the quirky magic objects that surround Harry and his friends. Rather than being solid and static, these objects embody initiative and activity. This is precisely the shift we'll experience as computational power moves beyond the desktop into everyday objects. [Tomalak's Realm]
My mom will like this. We will soon live in the world that Clarke described. 10:39:34 PM
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Open the Spectrum. A white paper on Open Spectrum I wrote with a lot of help from Jock Gill, David Reed and Dewayne Hendricks, is now posted on the Web. Here's how it begins: We are not in the age of Information. We are not in the age of the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection. Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger are our government, businesses, science, culture, education[sigma] Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized control points that have been the gatekeepers of our economic... [Joho the Blog]
One of the more influential thinkers talks about things important to me. I have seen firsthand how this connectedness increases a companies ability to innovate quickly. Just imagine how much more efficient Immunex would have been if we had actually TRIED to make a company with lots of connections and nodes rather than letting it happen spontaneously. By this I mean, having an upper management that really understood how to nourish this mode of doing business. The best biotech companies when it comes to innovation and creativity will most likely be the ones that follow this mode. Those using last century's command and control structure will only survive by buying innovation. They can not move fast enough and decisions are too costly to reverse because of the amount of time that was invested in making the decision in the first place. 9:48:28 PM
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Digital copyright: overkill (Economist): "The closely-watched trial is the first criminal prosecution brought under the DMCA, a law loathed by Internet enthusiasts. The trial will mark a crucial stage in the growing struggle between industries supplying content and those arguing that overly strict enforcement of copyright may crush the creativity of cyberspace." [LWN.net] [Universal Rule]
More on a very important trial. 9:30:00 PM
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Bothell company hopes to take on Viagra. BOTHELL -- The task before the Bothell-based biotech company Icos is daunting: Carve out a piece of the impotence treatment marketplace against a savvy pharmaceutical giant with overwhelming brand identity. [Business]
The next blockbuster for a Seattle biotech. Check out Icos middle of next year. 5:20:09 PM
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DECENTRALIZATION OF THE ENEMY. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Advisor, was on Fox News Sunday eight weeks back talking about Al Qaeda, and taking questions about the group's ability to function. Her comments were incredibly interesting because they reflect the struggle our country seems to be having in adapting to this new world of organizational decentralization. I would submit that the challenge is not one of pure information technology. It's the harder issues around doctrine, organizational structure, decision process, and inter-agency/cross-coalition trust that make up the core tenets and values required for decentralization. It does seem clear, though, that we have recognized that the only way to fight a decentralized target is to use decentralized tactics that give us the same agility.
When polled about the effectiveness of the ground and air operations in Afghanistan, Ms. Rice offered, "They can't run training camps and commanding and control and communications from a secure base in Afghanistan. That part has been extremely effective." The centricity of command and control infrastructure makes for delicious, hardened targets. This is certainly a core tenet of military strategy, but it highlights the fact that the real wiring behind these groups isn't the central targets, it's the organizational and resultant tactical approach that is giving us the heartburn.
But with the success in Afghanistan came the catalyst for horrendous leverage of Al Qaeda's cellular, node-based organizational structure. Rice continued, "But we've always thought that this might be an organization that could function in a fairly decentralized fashion, and so there continues to be concern about remnants of the organization that might still be plotting and planning. One of the issues is, how decentralized is the decision-making?" Indeed. Since Rice's interview some eight weeks ago, we've witnessed the carnage in Bali and Kenya.
What are the good guys to do? Al Qaeda's decentralized, cellular structure has pushed decision process down to the nodes. The immediate task is fight this node-based enemy with our own brand of decentralization. The really good news is that the conventional wisdom and ideology that is "Network Centric Warfare" has been embraced and socialized in the defense establishment. Specific to decision-making in a decentralized dogfight, it is recognized that network centric collaboration will need to:
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Drive the speed of decision. Command and control is an equation for "days and week". Decentralization of decision-making delivers solutions in "minutes and hours".
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Facilitate lethality in decision-making. This is the realm of John Stenbit's battle call of "Power to the Edge". We need to move away from myopic, centralized decision processes and embrace the gray matter that lives at the edge of the network and in the theatre of operation. These warfighters have the situational awareness, that, when married with hard data (GPS/GIS, force location, scrubbed intel), leads to real situational dominance.
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Embrace the notion that we will be working with nontraditional constituencies on a need-to-know, ad-hoc, situational basis. Last week, our government found itself needing to quickly swarm with the Israelis and the Kenyans. Before that, it was the Australians and the Indonesians.
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Recognize the need all of the above for proactive processes, not just the reactive.
Tactically, this equates to doctrine and emergent systems that facilitate:
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Just-in-time workgroups using just-in-time networks: Asking someone to deploy an application for collaboration and then working through the cross-certification of domain certificates so that individuals may begin to work together introduces serious drag. Secure, self-organization is a requirement. But it's also about commodity pipes that can be leveraged using military-grade crypto at the application layer. In a war on centricity, hardened targets may include data communications infrastructure. The need to swarm on "whatever is available to me" will become more important than ever. Even if it means 56kb dial tone to MSN from a hotel room in Qatar, or a Starbucks near the United Nations in New York.
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Just-in-time workgroups creating just-in-time applications: There is no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" application when it comes to collaborative practices. We will need to provide decentralized technology that facilitates the process challenges that asymmetry brings. It's a conflagration of componentry that can be assembled as needed, with access to web services.
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Just-in-time workgroups consuming just-in-time data, information, and intelligence: Web services at the far edges of the network, as well as to centralized object stores, will round out the decision process by facilitating intelligence and knowledge creation around hardened data.
Seems straightforward, right? Technology in this case will be the easy part. It's the long-held command-and-control views and doctrine that will need to be refined to facilitate a truly effective attack on a decentralized enemy. In my next post, I'll offer some observations from a government/private industry forum I presented at several weeks ago which point to just one of the issues in tactical execution. [Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog]
Decentralization and a link-node structure DOES allow decisions to be made very rapidly. Immunex did not have smarter scientists than other companies. We got to decision points faster, made decisions quicker and rapidly moved on. Because we could adapt quickly, altering decisions as facts altered was easy. Thus, a decision was not frought with so much baggage because we could change it if things changed. We laughed whenever the busines guys brought in change management people. Our professional lives were built around change. 5:15:50 PM
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Well, I called customer service for Lifetime, the makers of the basketball backboard that I bought with the wrong parts. They were very nice and have sent the parts out. Now I just hope that what they sent is what I need. It is nice to see customer service that actually seems to work.5:03:45 PM
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