In an Always On blog posting by Ken Fromm, "An Accelerated Period in History", part 3, Fromm discusses Mark Forman's, Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), remarks when he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Forman says "All homeland security IT investments must accelerate our response times and improve our decision making, and doing so requires significant changes in long-standing organizations, processes, information flows, and IT investments.

"Other projects more directly targeted at identifying and countering asymmetrical threats, however, may indeed have far-reaching impacts on enterprise thinking. These projects are funded from federal law enforcement, defense, or intelligence funds as part of programs such as RISSnet, Total Information Awareness (now named Terrorism Information Awareness), and other edge programs. The program topics include adaptive planning and advanced collaboration tools, data analytics and visualization programs, semantic-based interoperability tools, autonomic computing, and open grid service architectures. There is also growing interest in "self-aware" IT platforms and middleware that can be self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting. "

(emphasis added)

Change is hard, but necessary in today's world. The increased pressure on government due to the threat of Terrorism may change the recent pattern of innovation and adoption - to one where innovation occurs in the government and is adopted by private industry. This pattern was clearly in place during the early days of the space program. One familiar example of a technology developed there that migrated to private industry is Teflon. And just as during the space race, the pressure on the federal government to respond to terrorism will perform a forcing function for innovation. Will adoption by private industry be faster than before? Perhaps, since today's federal govenment is augmented heavily by private industry contractors, the information may flow more freely than before.

3:00:58 PM