Boundaries, Social Capital and Cyberinfrastructure

Vince KellenCIO, University of Kentucky

Vince.Kellen@uky.eduFebruary 21, 2010

CI Days, 2010

CI Days, 2010

Growth in business computer assets

Index of computer assets held by industry

U.S. economy 1990-2007

31X increase in 17 years

Brynjolfsson, E. & Saunders, A. (2010). Wired for Innovation. How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy. MIT

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Internet and web permeate engineering and science and of course, everyday life for everyday people

By the end of 2010, 5 billion people will have cell phones (73% of the world’s population)

Wireless broadband, with about 600 million users today, will be nearing 1 billion in the next several years

New medical imaging (real time, 4D, fusion) will be requiring HPC for pre- and post- processing, superfast networking

Petascale computing is here with its requisite challenges

Exascale is being contemplated and will require very different approaches to power, memory subsystems, interconnects, programming, organizations, management, etc.

Progress, progress, progress…

Difficulties

Fragmentation

Architectural inertia

Data integration

Old boundaries

Economic development

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Growth in connectivity may increase fragmentation. Neighbors don’t read the same things. Fractionation of knowledge makes integration across domains harder, increasing fragmentation

Systems, built in haste, can be difficult to integrate. Old software doesn’t easily port to new environments, creating inertia

Data are being defined separately by each discipline making raw data reuse difficult

Sociological barriers and cultural boundaries can frustrate technology adoption and scientific collaboration

Building geographical clusters of research, industry, government and banking/investment is very difficult and time consuming and has its own ‘network effect’

Difficulties

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Research is an IT intensive, competitive market• Organizational capital investments magnify IT investments• IT can lower barriers of entry (Moore’s law?)• But as time goes by, the environment becomes

inhospitable to smaller players• Competition in IT intensive sectors is costly

What may be going on• Over-optimism (we can do this)• Limited planning foresight (future, neighbors, competitors)• Organizational factors that inhibit good use of the

investment

IT investments behave differently

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Organizational capital and IT assets

Brynjolfsson, E., Hitt, L., & Yang, S. (2002). Intangible Assets: Computers and Organizational Capital. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activities, 137- 198.

What is OC?OC = how orgs do work

E.g., investments in training, process improvements, best practices, federated decision-making, TQM, etc.

Findings:Organizations with both high investments in IT assets and organizational capital garnered a disproportionate share of market value from investors.

Leaders do MUCH better than laggards.

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Ever endemic, silos can prevent building large-scale architectures

Creativity is deeply personal. Tools and thought intertwine in the mind of the designer. Investigators and leaders naturally want to be in control of their designs and hence their tools

Old leadership paradigm: hire very smart people and give them what they need

Incentive systems typically reward individual versus group contribution

Organizations persist because the people within them are bound to some common concepts, terms and shared history. It is human nature to defend this organizational inheritance

Why do silos persist?

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Choices

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A cultural shift that values building transformative relationships between people and organizations. This is somewhat less developed in academia than in industry

Investment in people and organizations that can span the boundaries of business, academics and government

Ontological engineering, more controlled vocabularies, constructing maps that relate different taxonomies to each other

Well-orchestrated local, regional and national planning

Innovations in management. Use and development of incentives to promote continued teamwork and collaboration

Transparency so all parties can jointly understand and plan

Things we will need to address these challenges

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With the economic and budgetary challenges ahead, we will need some big ideas to build support around and advance

Just as increasing scale in hardware requires eliminating all algorithmic and process inefficiency, we will need to reduce similar organizational kinks to afford the future

To effectively prioritize we will need more relationship capital

The size and scale of future cyberinfrastructure will require collective resources. No one will be able to go it alone

Kentucky has some unique advantages of geography and government/education/industry relationships. This should be a critical ingredient for success

Going forward

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Questions?