Wednesday, August 13, 2003

ENCRYPTION AND THE ISO STACK: Wired's September issue has a great article on the USS Ronald Reagan (pg 120), a ship which holds the distinction of being the most wired ship in the world. Wired compares and contrasts the components of the ship's "flexible technology platform" when it leaves port for the first time later this year, and the next generation of upgrades that will be available soon thereafter. What caught my eye was the network infrastructure: The ship will sail with more than 400Gbps of hard wire network capacity. What REALLY grabbed my attention was the commentary about the ship's wireless network capability which is made up of gateways handling 802.11b, Bluetooth, and infrared traffic. It seems though, that what should have been a nice 11Mbps virtual pipe has been reduced to 4.8Mbps because of the crypto that had to be added to the components working at the lower levels of the ISO stack. We have a real opportunity to think differently when it comes to secure communications. Our laptops and PC's have largely been relegated to the work of VT320's, which leaves a lot of horsepower for computation. End-to-end crypto providers allow us to move the encryption and I&A services up to the application layer with execution on the PC where excess CPU cycles are available. The beauty of this model is the ability to run massively secure and authenticated message traffic on inherently non-secure wireless networks, without impacting throughput. 10:52:35 PM

THE POWER OF EVENT SWARMS: We had a lot of success with the use of Groove during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Robert, Josh, and Phil on the Groove Humanitarian Team worked nights and weekends in support of DoD, State Department, USAID, and NGO activities as these organizations worked to avert a major humanitarian crisis in Iraq. I've been intrigued for some time about technology frameworks, as well as the political/cultural aspects, for facilitating small unit swarming as organizations attack opportunities, tasks, and threats. While small-unit swarming often focuses on the rapid, ad-hoc formation of affinity groups, the discussion usually ends there. Call it "task swarming" if you will. During Iraqi Freedom, elements of the U.S. government and various NGO's used Groove for Humanitarian Rapid Assessment. After we were done breaking things in an Iraqi city, these folks would come in and assess what was needed to help the people in the city. This was a classic example of task swarming where more than 100 people people from 30 organizations came together within 48 hours and went to work. We saw it many times during the conflict as groups worked to coordinate medical logistics and other humanitarian tasks. Groove worked flawlessly. But something even more interesting was occurring and the activity resembled something more akin to a phenomenon I'll call "event swarming". Indeed, these teams came together to attack the task of "Rapid Assessment", but there was a sub-swarming that occurred as discrete events took place within the Groove shared space. We had recommended that team members turn on Groove's tool notification service and set the Rapid Assessment Forms tool to "High", which would result in a Groove IM whenever a new assessment arrived. The day that "event swarming" became obvious was the day that the statue of Saddam was brought down. As Rapid Assessments were received by members of the space, we would receive Groove IM's directing us to the form and space in which it resided. What was fascinating was to see the number of people that would click through the IM and arrive in the shared space. Where there had been 5 people working in the space, there were now 50. Instantaneously, the space became super-charged with activity, which was most evident in the chat pane as people, separated by thousands of miles, began to discuss what needed to be done, who needed to do it, and decide when it would happen. This has interesting implications around any process or task trying to affect cycle-time reduction. A machine-directed traffic cop pointing people to data relevant to their mission and task the moment it becomes available yields real decision superiority and mission speed. In this case, it also saves lives. 10:18:34 PM