There is an excellent article on O’Reilly Radar about the use of Web applications in a military environment. Basically, DARPA came up with a combination of a Wiki and Google Maps that would allow soldiers to see where IEDs were being utilized by the enemy, sharing intelligence in real time and allowing patterns to be found and actions to be implemented by the people on the ground.

This really is an outstanding example of the power of information architecture. Traditional intelligence focused on getting information up the chain of command, getting it analyzed, and getting a comprehensive plan back to the troops. However, this situation was too fluid, too fast, too rapidly changing to go through all that rigamarole. So, the oversight and aggregation process was automated.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

First, it seems to highlight a general rule of technology: Once a process can’t move faster or be more flexible than automation, it will be subsumed. We have seen this a million times in a million different ways. Most of us have been a part of this process, either as an automator or being automated.

Second, it highlights how important it is for management and administration to improve as rapidly as the organizations they support. In the past, it has been the job of management to drive their subordinate organizations to improve, and often they did not hold themselves to the same standards. I can recall a time where the person who demanded that we automate everything possible required us to manually fill out and send an Excel spreadsheets that documented our progress.

I think that we are in the throws of new wave of organizational change based on newer, more flexible technologies like Wikis, Open Mapping Tools, and Social Networking. We should be seeing a lot more of stories like this in the MSM over the next year or so as it moves into the more public consciousness. And, in 24 months it will be a part of the common wisdom, and we won’t remember doing thing any differently.

Steve Hamm at Business Week has a short post about the hiring practices of Chinese IT firms, which hopefully will open the eyes of some of the leaders here in the west. Symbio is an outsourcing company that was facing a problem with not having enough qualified recruits. Their response?

[Symbio CEO Jacob] Hsu and his colleagues decided they needed a feeder program to prepare college students to work for them, so they recently established software institutes in the Harbin Institute of Technology and Shandong University, both in the coastal city of Weihai. That’s where Symbio is about to establish a new development center. Says Hsu, who grew up in San Francisco: “Other companies have university partnerships; we run the university departments.”

This isn’t something Symbio undertakes lightly. “We’re a human potential factory. We’re in the talent management business,” says Hsu. “In the next couple of years the companies that win will be the ones who manage talent the best.”

The Chinese have an abundance mentality, a positive outlook for their long-term future. Not only are they doing business successfully today, they are investing in building a generation of leaders for tomorrow. At the same time, western companies are shedding jobs and looking to outsource jobs and import labor to meet the needs of the moment. The west isn’t going to lose its edge because of quarterly profit outlooks, it is going to lose it because it lacks the vision to see the future and the audacity to put itself at the center of it!

GigaOM has an interesting article about the impact of web 2.0 on network engineers. Namely, that the maturation of the internet has made the skills of a good network person a lot less important:

I see the current state of the Internet as the ultimate success … You can deploy a wildly successful Web 2.0 application that serves millions of users and never know how a router, switch or load-balancer works. Even network security and firewalls that were making headline news not more than a few years ago are considered perfunctory. The success of these networking devices and technologies has enabled them to become part of the technology landscape that exists for all to use as they see fit, similar to the microprocessor or electricity.

It is always odd to see the once-glamorous jobs of your youth thrown onto the scrap heap of history (think about the differences in perception between the masons of the middle ages and your local bricklayer). Network Engineers were once the masters of a difficult and arcane field, literally bringing information from chaos. Now, the wizards have been trapped in tiny control panels for now, until they can be embedded in silicon for all time.

This has really got me to thinking about my own field, and its future. What specialties are going to dissapear if data becomes as reliable as electricity? For one thing, I think we would see ETL and Business Analysis become a single career path that is much more abstract and tools-based. With the advent of good BPM, I could see a lot of the scheduling and other mechanics pushed off towards the DBA’s and Systems Administrators. Also, I think that a lot of the hardware could be appliance based, or outsourced completely. Of course, this leaves a great opportunity for open source BI and for nimble players to attack the market and take advantage of the innovators dilemma.

A brave (an infinitely more useful) new world!

Complexification.net is a very cool site from an artist that uses computation and mathematics to create art.  Some pieces are striking, others whimsical, all interesting.  Being a math geek myself, I can’t seem to keep my eyes off of them.  Enjoy!

Under The Radar has an interesting post about overcoming EC2’s weaknesses, dynamic IP addressing and 24×7 operations.  The folks at WeoGeo have designed an application called WeoCEO that supposedly addresses these issues.  I think this is a very exciting development, especially when combined with the ability to use S3 as a file system.

The hype about EC2 is that it enables people to ‘rent-a-cloud’, paying for and using as many or as few servers as they wish at any given time.  The problem is that currently these servers are limited in ways that seem minor until you start working with them on practical matters.  This is really visible when working with data and databases on EC2, essentially you have to either change either your tools or your paradigm.  The problem then becomes one of economics, where you try to balance the savings from renting a server and storage against the cost of solving a problem with tools that require a lot of customization.
I would love to be a part of the WeoCEO beta, and see how things work along with S3Infinidisk.  If the problems of addresssing and persistence are solved, then we truly have the ability to scale easily without large-scale customization.  Taking care of these is a giant leap forward, and will help EC2 truly live up to the hype that it has generated in the developer community.