 | Issue: | Global-ICT 2007 |
| Article no.: | 11 | |
| Topic: | Welcome to anywhere | |
| Author: | Emily Nagle Green | |
| Title: | President & CEO | |
| Organisation: | Yankee Group Research, Inc | |
| PDF size: | 260KB |
About author
Emily Nagle Green is the President and CEO of Yankee Group Research, Inc. She also sits on the Yankee Group Board of Directors. Before joining Yankee Group, Ms Green was the CEO of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, CERA, and led its sale to IHS Energy. Previously, Ms Green served for nine years in leadership roles with the IT advisory firm Forrester Research. She was Managing Director of Forrester Research North America and also launched and built the company’s European operations. Ms Green is a frequent speaker on the challenges and opportunities in connectivity change. Ms Green is also the President of MITX, New England’s trade association for digital technology, marketing and media professionals. Emily Green holds a B.S.L. degree in linguistics from Georgetown University and an M.S.E. degree in artificial intelligence and computer graphics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Article abstract
IP networks carry anything that can be digitised and are driving global connectivity. IP networks will soon be everywhere and this will change scale and nature of connectivity itself, its economics and even social structures. The merging of media and the ability to individually target consumers will provide the basis for a shift to an advertising supported environment. Ubiquitous networks will play an increasing role in businesses which, in turn, will adapt to new communications-based work styles and systems.
Full Article
On a recent trip through India, I found myself at one point in the middle of a massive urban logjam of cars, trucks, buses, three-stroke tuk-tuks, and cows. The road was poor and rutted; stones for its improvement had been delivered to the side of the road, but had been co-opted along with some torn plastic into temporary shelters for dozens of families living in the limited shade they provided. A young couple hovered hopefully over a man attempting to repair an ancient bicycle. Crude stands manned by ragged children offered roughly made candles for a nearby temple. A steady surge of people squeezed through the smallest cracks in traffic. In the middle of it all, a barefoot and nearly naked man went from car to car – selling mobile phone antennas and batteries. When, I wondered, would the people living by the side of the road be able to buy those same items? We are arriving at a unique point in modern history where we are poised to unite the farthest reaches of the globe with useful, high-quality technology resources, creating a permanent transformation of business and social interactions over the next 20 years. This global connectivity revolution is driven principally by the adoption of IP as a de facto standard for open telecommunications networks to carry anything that can be digitised, by the emerging ubiquity of broadband capacity on those networks, and the delivery of those networks through a variety of physical means including wireless technologies. We foresee a time soon when the network will be anywhere, when people can take their experiences with them anywhere they go, and when enterprises can connect with their resources anywhere. The evolution of these tendencies and networks will change not just the scale and nature of connectivity itself, but its economics – along with larger social structures and norms wherever they extend their reach. Every leader in the ICT industry has had at least one personal taste of the explosion of technology and the potential implications that explosion holds for improving the state of the world. How can we use the potential intelligence of the emerging global network to connect people with each other for mutual benefit? I see countless examples everywhere I go, many of which will be explored by other authors between the covers of this issue: remote villages using mobile phones to learn the market price of goods they had previously been underpaid for by middlemen; illiterate women able to start small businesses re-selling phone minutes; impoverished schools gaining teaching resources through the Internet that they couldn’t afford to purchase in textbook form. Two of the themes I see in our own research results. Inexpensive technology at the edge of the network – While the continued drop in cost of computing technology means that some of us can have more and more power in our hands for the same money, one major opportunity of a powerful and pervasive network is that we can use its intelligence and resources to actually limit the technology required to reach the farthest parts of the earth. I urge us all to provide support for visionary efforts that exploit that, such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative (www.laptop.org). Threaded media experiences – While in technologically and economically mature parts of the world, consumers enjoy many media experiences – television, film, radio, portable music and video, and more – they are largely independent events: discrete, independent, and unrelated. As the converged IP-driven networks emerge, we can look to the intelligence about its users, and its meta-intelligence about its own capabilities, to provide continuous, fluid media experiences as we move from one place and one device to the next. When media activities can be threaded together like pearls on a string, brands – which provide the bulk of the economic support for mass media – can more effectively create and maintain relationships with consumers. That’s an economically efficient spiralling of commercial value. What are the challenges we’ll have to address along the way? Three principal issues could undermine the contributions the ICT sector makes if we don’t figure them out with the same intensity we apply to devising our products and services. Reaching the consumer – What is a viable economic model for introducing networks and edge technology in places where the GDP (gross domestic product) cannot support the full cost? Advertising. While consumers accept the financial support of advertising for all other media experiences, it will take some education and patience on all our parts for the acceptance of the market to evolve to communication networks as well. We expect to see business model ‘mash-ups’ emerge while firms experiment with the best way to economically deliver value where the end user cannot or will not bear the full cost of the experience. Supporting the enterprise – As organisations make increased use of a global network, workers bring an increasing amount of consumer-oriented technology to work each day, too. A ubiquitous network and a plethora of client-side platforms – PCs and mobiles for sure, but also music players, storage keys, and many more portable devices with computing, memory and connectivity – the enterprise becomes a much more porous entity. How will we manage and secure our technology and our information assets in this context? We believe that a Zen-like approach to accommodating corporate ICT will emerge, with a management philosophy that is less about control and more about adoption and adaptation. Regulating the network – Regulation must keep pace, but with a light touch. Instead of protecting the incumbent providers of network services around the world, regulators must recognise the broader competitive landscape. Regulatory environments that encourage experimentation while providers and consumers alike take the time needed to explore the specifics of services – features, pricing, technology platforms – will provide the best support for the opportunity to connect the world with ICT. Since the time of Gutenberg’s printing press, the inexorable pace of technology’s advance has continued to bring the globe together, sharing both the best and worst of our world with more and more of its inhabitants. May we do the best we can to make that a fair and positive experience for all.
