Computing has many capabilities and information technology is now a driver for most business ventures including multi-billon dollar companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Facebook and Amazon.
The following five basic capabilities are available to any organization via investments in computing
infrastructure.
Long term record storage
The advent of inexpensive desktop and pocket computing has had as much of an influence on business and the Gutenberg press did on the dissemination of information over two hundred years ago. Computing facilities now house all the records for most organizations in a digital format on a file system usually residing either on a series hard drives or a highly available and redundant Storage Array Network; Having these commuting resources allows an organization or business the ability to store records of all practices and procedures; these include records of communications and meetings in the form of E-mail and minutes letters. We no longer measure libraries in terms of psychical storage space but we measure our available storage for information in the number of “libraries of congress” or Gigabytes of data that may be stored upon them. This facilitates the development of a long term corporate memory; where once an agent in an organization would have to peer over archives and file folders for hours on end to locate information they may now simply submit a query to an internal database of records to locate relevant data in the form of Documents, Communications, Actuarial Records (Books of business) or any other relevant information. The availability of vast amounts of information regarding various fields of science are turning once traditional fields of research involving psychical tests and trials into exercises in data management and mining. Cervek et al (1999)istate that the availability of a universal design of a data grid to access these now enormous data sets (peta-bytes of information) must follow a standardized format to ensure interoperability and that any research conducted upon it is sound. Long term storage equates to a perfect memory provided the integrity of the data that is stored is sound.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management is defined by Junpil Han and Mani Subrami (1999)ii as the ability to manage the intangible assets within an organization; that is to distribute and manage the intangible information within the individuals that work for said organization. Knowledge Management Systems are IT services and infrastructure that become business enablers and competitive advantages by ensuring that all the Value derived from the knowledge of an organization and it's business are maintained and transferable. This would not be possible without an investment in a Knowledge Management System which resides on computing infrastructure.
Business Process Automation
Business process automation can be loosely defined as the integration of automation engines within an organizations infrastructure; where each independent cost centre may be viewed as having it's own automation engines: ie; Finance and Accounting may use packages such as Accpack, Simply accounting ; Oracle Financial or people-soft to accomplish common tasks like payroll, renumeration and the calculation of balance sheets including current operations. Business process automation would involve the integration of these systems with business intelligence and marketing platforms to further automate various business processes such as “manufactering” or “software production”. Again business process automation requires that multiple IT sytsems be integrated and become aware of one another; this usually involves the adoption of WASDL or XMLRPC and web 2.0 based standards and data interchange. Examples of BPA include automation of the reconciliation of electronic books; say the payroll database with the transactions as input to the accounting platform from the bank directly; basically BPA allows an organization to streamline it's operations and realize effectiveness in staffing and human time by automation as much as can be automated.
General Purpose Computing
When Alan Turing conceived of his machine; the Turing Machine in 1936, Barker-Plummer (1995)iii as a means to conduct thought experiments with computing systems he did not realize at the time that it might be capable of simulating every algorithm ever created. Thus we may define general computing as the application of any system or algorithm by a computer to any data to obtain any information desired. General computing within the day to day activities of an organization would consists of the desktop operations of it's agents and their tool sets however complex or simple they may be. These include the mundane manipulation of information in spreadsheets all the way up ot the most advanced reasarch in statistical applications such as SaaS or similar scenarios. General computing is any computing inolving math and a computer.General computing is using records as maintained by long term storage to facilitate the creation of value or gleaning insight into the available data.
Interconnectivity of Working groups
The information superhighway in it's current form as defined by the companies that run these networks are a series of high bandwidth optical interconnections between geographically disperse municipalities, provinces, states and countries. Realistically the Internet is mapped by CAIDA project n.a. (2011)iv and is governed by international standards bodies in each country with access to it. What the INTERNET facilitates is rapid exchange of information among groups of geographically disperse agents. The nature of these exchanges is usually beneficial when business and commerce are concerned; the risks of interconnection arise when organizations expose themselves via unsound software or business practices in relation to the types and nature in which they engage in communicators on the INTERNET. The risks of Fraud and Exploit by agents in countries where little or no oversight exists has had academics move to the “INTERNET 2” which is a seperate ultra high speed network for the sole purpose of academia.
The current networks that are used by business to manage it's organization and employees are semiprivate or private by using security technologies such as application virtualization or the use of encrypted networks on top of the INTERNET such as Virtual Private Networks or SSL access gateways to ensure that employees have access to the information resources from where ever they may INTERNET access; as INTERNET access is fairly ubiquitous in the industrialized world then your organization may no longer be bound by psychical constraints of available office space. This of course gives rise to the notion of what methods and metrics are to be used to determine if an employee is productive or not; since in effect the punch clock is no longer a physical device. The benefits of utilizing the INTERNET vs physical presence are many, inexpensive video communications over instant messaging is the once dreamed of “Video Phone” and it was developed by software companies not phone companies; this inexpensive access allows organizations to compete at a multi-national level with few key resources conducing far more specialized work in local or remote locations. Many organizations of today including some of the top preforming public ally traded companies reduce travel and operations costs by having virtual meetings.
The Death of Privacy
Privacy still exists as a legal fiction; the police and state may not commit transgressions against an individuals privacy such as searching or monitoring their communications without due cause which is defined by Canadian common law as the procedure and process of hearing before a judge to obtain a warrant to engage in surveillance. This due process is a major component in Habeas Corpus (the write to equality before the law) and forms the basis upon which civilized society functions. The truth about privacy is that it is long dead; it was killed by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and Microsoft. The standards of Web 2.0 had a minor role but the agents are these companies and their core business of managing and presenting our information to us. Google is the worst offender when it comes to privacy, it is estimated that Google has over 1,000,000 systems operating in a custom designed cluster as an amalgamation of data-centers across the globe; mostly in north america; hwoever to ensure speedy searched they co-locate as close to major populations as possible. When Eric Schmidt, Richmond (2010)v the previous CEO of Google once stated:
“Our company’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”
The Privacy commissioner in Canada filed a Law suit following the comment and the ensuring enquiry was designed to determine what information Google maintained on the infamous and useful “Street” view trucks; as it turned out, Google would also sample any WiFi networks that were available when driving; they kept this information internally, although they did not publish the WiFi information the use of this information without consent of the owners of these networks in Canada was a clear violation of The Privacy Act.
Recently the CEO and Founder Reid Hoffman of Linked In in the Davos Annual Meeting vistated that:
“Privacy Issues are for Old People since the value of connection is greater than privacy issues”
George Cummings the CEO of Forserter stated that (2010):
"The 15 most trafficked sites of the world seven of them social sites; which constitutes 5 to 6 hours of a day on the consumption of media, twitter has over 25 million unique visitors per day, Facebook 130 million users per day, my space 50 to 60 unique visitors per day, and linked in about 15 million and ming about 6 million these are from Com-score."
Only 17% of the on-line community uses social networking sites; the age ranges are aimed at younger INTERNET users. Thus the current trend is adoption among young adults. In addition to the social networking sites, on-line search and Geo-lcation services; the other major offenders are our own Institutions, our provincial and federal governments in efforts to ease access to our own services these include the databases of our hard information such as property ownership, licensing and registration information as well as birth and death records via sites like “Ancetry.com” where we may review and pay for our genealogy. In addition to these our banks and creditors routinely track our purchases to better serve us and to glean information into our spending habits.
Thus the organizations that have served us for so many decades now with the advent of inexpensive
computing by utilizing the above five capabilities of computing on various large scales; may now
maintain a permanent memory of every action we may have ever been involved with, including any
pictures that others have taken of us or any records we may maintain in any municipal or federal
government. Thus we may see that large businesses have made huge profits by simply asking us to
disclose information we see as valueless to facilitate connection and communications in a transparent
manner but by doing so we have sacrificed our privacy for temporary and transient communication and
connections. I believe that the value of a shared identity is and having a smaller global village is very
real but I also believe that the value of my privacy is incalculable it's a right in my country and I'd like
for my children to enjoy this right as well.
i Ann Chervenak , Ian Foster , Carl Kesselman , Charles Salisbury , Steven Tuecke (1999) The Data Grid: Towards an Architecture for the Distributed Management and Analysis of Large Scientific Datasets [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32.6963 (Accessed on October 10th 2011)
ii Hahn, Junpil; Subramani, Mani R. (1999) A framework for Knoledge Management Systems Issues and Challenges for Therory and Pratices [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.114.7693&rep=rep1&type=pdf (Accessed on October 10th 2011)
iii Barker-Plummer, David (2011) The stanford encylopedia of philosophy [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/ (Accessed on October 10th 2011)
iv n.a. (2011) CAIDA Visualizations [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble From: http://www.caida.org/publications/visualizations/ (Accessed on October 10th 2011)
v Richmond, Shane (October 25th ,2010) How Google crossed the creepy line [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8086191/How-Google-crossed-the-creepy-line.html (Accessed on October 10th 2011)
vi World Economic Forum, (2011) Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - The Growing Influence of Social Networks [Online] Video,http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pexGCUPlUeA#! (Accessed on October 10th 2011)
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