Last nights presentation went well, which is always a relief, especially as my sat-nav had sent me 'round the Wrekin'; we had good attendance and it was great to see so many people I know come along too.
Mike Smith, Technology Strategy Director at ATOS Origin, with whom I've worked quite a bit with across the UK Government IT industry, was accompanied by Keith Inight, also of ATOS and a fellow CBI Innovation, Science and Technology (IST) committee member.
David Miller, author of CIO Magazine recommended "Business Focused IT and Service Excellence", was also there and we spoke about the challenges facing the IT Services industry given the scenarios I brought up.
It was especially good to see Frank Santoro there as well, Frank and I worked together at East Midlands Electricity (EME, then PowerGen, and now e.ON) about fifteen years ago or so, whilst we were both working on the 19M programme, and I haven't seen him for over ten years. Frank was an early contributor to Open Source projects like SAMBA and the SAMBA toolset, and a huge fan of Sun technologies, in fact I was introduced to Sun hardware technology by him.
19M was the name given to the UK wide integration programme that enabled all Gas, and then Electricity, companies, to communicate in a standardised way, so by enabling competition across the Utility industry, and ultimately customer choice. It's my favourite example of a 'successful' national integration programme.
In the talk I covered:
- the history of Futurology, starting with Buckminster Fuller's "Ephemeralization"
- Sun's view of the future and how our strategy is mapped to that view (borrowing from some of the work of Greg Papadopoulos and Jim Baty)
- Sun's Cloud Computing initiative, what's driving Cloud Computing and how we expect Cloud Computing to impact across all industries
- the changes expected to be seen in key technical innovations such as the Internet with the semantic web and agent based computing
- the challenges for the the UK and how the UK Government (or at least a couple of the Departments) are modelling the future state of the UK and their conclusions to date
- how other, major, Futurologists, such as James Martin and Peter Cochrane, view the future for the World, both in the near and short term, and their opinions on how the challenges the World has can be addressed
- the key emerging technologies such as Extreme Bandwidth Internet, Nanotechnology, Ultra Intelligent Super Computing, Non Human like Intelligence, Automation, Genetic Engineering, Synthetic Biology, Brain / Computer Interfaces, Intelligent Robotics, Carbon Nanotubes (and the extension of Moore's Law thereby), Quantum Entanglement (and the emergence of Quantum Entanglement Cryptography), and Transhumanism
- finishing off with Ray Kurzweil, the singularity and how the law of accelerating returns actually brings us all the way back to Ephemeralization
Phew! All in the space of an two hours; extended to three after an extensive Q and A session.
I also promised that I'd post the link to Francis Heyligen's paper on the subject of increasing system complexity and information overload caused by the Ephemeralization of systems, and how this complexity can negate some of it's advantages (a key problem I see in the proliferation of complexity of large scale IT estates), entitled "Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control" (in PDF format).
Many thanks to John Wallace, Secretary of the Nottingham and Derby Branch of the British Computer Society (BCS), for setting up and co-ordinating the event.
Let's hope tonight's talk in the centre of Manchester on "Enterprise Architecture Case Studies" is as successful!
