Book Project: Abstract

From IRF Wiki

The International Research Forum saw more than 30 leading academics, governmental officials, IT executives, and consultants to discuss the challenges and opportunities in four key areas:

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web [1]
IT & Security [2]
Real World Awareness [3]
IT as a Tool for Growth and Development [4]

In each area, the discussion first examined different perspectives on the the issues at hand, then raised key questions, and then attempted to describe the challenges to be overcome for progress to be made. A survey of the session transcript makes two things clear:

• While the format of the IRF launched a worthwhile discussion to begin, it also raised many important questions that demand additional, serious study.

• Second, the challenges and possible solutions identified in each topic area repeated themselves and could be grouped together and analyzed as patterns of success or failure.

The organizers of the IRF realized that if they created a book that identifies these patterns and uses them to complete the discussion, they could:

• Deepen the understanding of the four topic areas and bring more people into the discussion

• Identify how the patterns were working in the four areas as explained in the proceedings

• Show how by understanding the patterns and asking the right questions, you can improve the peformance of your organization as you apply technology.

The repeating patterns of both success and failure that were identified in the analysis are:

• Educate the Team about the Big Picture: Each contributor to the process of applying a new technology operates with what might be called a limited view or perhaps a restricted contextual consciousness. In brief, no single player is aware of the full, complete picture - of how the technology is to be used, that is, and what the problem is that it’s intended to solve. This lack of a full view, moreover, tends to create problems in the implementation, design and use of technology solutions.

• Understand the Relationship Between Hub and Edge: Hub systems are ultra reliable, relatively inflexible, highly automated, and secure. Edge systems are collaborative, open, and unstructured. The tension between the transactional IT hub systems like ERP that operates at the core of most large organizations and the collaborative systems at the organizations’ edge like email, shared drives, wikis and blogs are frequently not formally acknowledged when technology is applied. This leads to applications that fail because they do not have a clear identity as hub or edge and lack key functionality required for success. Keeping the idea of hub and edge firmly in your mind brings clarity to your work when implementing technology.

• Avoid Over Automation: Many software applications frequently over-automate processes or do not allow for flexibility required by collaborative processes. Success can be achieve by reducing scope and doing less better rather than more badly.

• Embrace Incrementalism: Development processes frequently over-estimate the quality of initial requirements and do not allow for iterative improvement of solutions. Planning on a series of versions to confirm requirments reduces risk.

In response, the book will present these patterns of success and failure, use them to complete the analysis of the key areas started at the conference, and then provide examples that show how understanding patterns may reduce risk when designing and implementing technology. Further, the book will examine key strategies and methods for creating technology solutions such as open-source, model-driven development, service-oriented architecture, visualization, and voice-response interfaces and explain how those strategies and techniques help address challenges identified by the patterns. For example, the services of service oriented architecture offers a bridge between hub and edge systems. Community-based development methods and tools from open source support and promote agile development, as does model-driven development.