Book Project: IT as a Tool for Growth
From IRF Wiki
IT as a Tool for Growth and Development
- The questions raised at the IR Forum are discussed in the context of the patterns.
- Further ideas and research are added from the research interviews.
Ideas from the Proceedings
IT and economic growth, in Europe and in developing world:
- ICT does not solve the structure problems. ... it's an amplifier for structure reform ... [in Europe] application of ICT is a strength. ...the main focus of research in Europe is into integrating and designing very complex, well-engineered and also secure, safe and robust systems and not so much to produce tools, hardware tools or software tools. ... Embedded systems is a great example where [Europe has] core capabilities, where [it] could actually continue to be a global leader. ... the European retail industry, there is only one #1, this is Wal-Mart, American, but #2 to #16 are all European companies, Carrefour, Metro and so on. #17 is Japan, one company, and then it goes back to the United States. ... 80% of innovation today, for example in automotive, is software-driven – or is ICT-driven. ... our industry has a huge opportunity anywhere in the world. It has nothing to do with Europe or any other geography. ... there are more software developers right now in the embedded environment than in all of the software companies you can think of all together. So if you list Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and whatever, it's nothing compared to what a Siemens and Alcatel and Phillips and Ericson, all of them together, have on software development. So the power is there and we have to understand how we can all leverage that. ... we have to convince society that ICT brings benefits that they understand and that are of value for society. If we succeed there, politics will follow with frameworks, legislation and hopefully positive conditions, and then the industry will be responsible for transposition, market opportunity, generation of jobs, including new business models and developing new market opportunities. ... we must convince them that ICT research helps higher economic growth, that ICT helps in tackling emerging challenges in areas such as security, aging and inclusion, that ICT is not only important by itself, but also because it shapes how we do things, and that we are having a paradigm shift based on ICT, because it will become more and more embedded into the fabric of society.
Future of software development - scripts rule:
- The difference between the year 2010 and the year 2000 is that the script-based person may be – depending how you measure it – more productive than the formal programmer. And this is changing. The meaning of development is productive development. Business development is changing and the research agenda that reflects, do we get a better return on arbitrary Web 2.0 platform than on a more formal platform, those are the kinds of R&D questions that I think are going to become more and more important for growth and development.
- ” ... the challenge that the rise of scripting languages poses is that it can give a lot of individuals and a lot of organizations the believe that they're living with the 80:20 principle. That for 20% of the cost they're getting 80% of the value of SAP. And for some of the organizations that will be true, for others it may be that missing 20% that makes all the difference and the rigor
- Ease of use is a key issue - better user-interfaces. Develop lower cost PCs and ATMs. Master constraint-based development - a significant challenge for large organizations likes SAP.
- It's communications that brings the world closer together and it's the communications that is the real accelerator here. The computers, that’s a separate thing. It's important, but it's not the main driver.
- "can scripting-based software development enable to build constraint-based solutions?", which you both referred to, at a cost point affordable for the emerging economies.
Wrap-up topics:
- Higher search precision.
- Better interoperability, whatever that means ...
- Web 2.0 is not the semantic web - Web 2.0 is mash up applications
- Web is a platform, democratization, new possibilities,
- perpetual life-cycle,
- multiple devices,
- software is a service (?) experience
- if we have the mash up of these applications really coming, how much can we trust the combined application? ... one of the reasons why we [SAP] are successful is because our customers trust us on what we have developed. .. If you do mash up with community building, how much do you trust the application that has been mashed up ...?
- how do I verify identity of the data source and how do I basically establish accuracy of the data source
- IT security: general frustration ... at firewalls and KPIs technologies ... one of the questions ... is, can low-level hardware (?) be a secure container for valuable content? ... The answer is no ... How fundamentally can that change?
- ... where do I get a better return on my security investment? Is it training people better? Is it investing more in the system? Is it investing in the technology itself? … has to be a multi-layered approach. The challenge, if you're a business, is, where do you get the best return on your security investment? ... what are the layers of security that you deal with, and ... which layer gives you, for the service that you provide, which security investment gives you the best return? ... there is a role for infrastructure providers. If you assume that SAP is infrastructure, that Microsoft is infrastructure, that Cisco is infrastructure ...
