The Supernova 2008 conference is currently running in San Francisco – on the theme of “the Network Age”. Professor Kevin Werbach has outlined ten challenges:
“In the Information Age, computers and communications networks produced a global village and astounding gains in economic productivity. The Network Age incorporates those advances into an environment where anything connects to anything, anyone to anyone, anywhere, anytime. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re far enough along to start seeing the effects… The Network Age poses ten basic challenges for all of us interested in the future of technology, media, and communications:
Scarcity and Abundance
(Both are sources of value, yet they cannot coexist.)
Choice and Coordination
(Users are in control, but don’t they need guides to avoid being overwhelmed?)
Aggregation and Fragmentation
(Network effects mean that the big players get bigger, but at the same time, markets increasingly specialize and personalize.)
Stability and Disruption
(True innovation requires disruption, but disruption can be painful and costly, especially where investment and trust are significant.)
Behavior and Rationality
(People don’t always act according to models of rationality, especially when connected to one another, but our economic frameworks assume they do.)
Complexity and Simplicity
(Complex adaptive systems produce emergent behavior and growth, but simplicity is a virtue… in both life and information technology.)
Openness
(Everyone agrees it’s good, even essential in a networked environment, but no one can say what exactly it means, or how much openness is beneficial.)
Governance
(How much do networks and their users need to be managed or protected, and where do those controls come from?)
Scale
(The local is different from the global, whether the subject is enterprise collaboration or usage patterns or cloud computing infrastructure.)
Sustainability
(How to build organizations and systems that endure, especially in a world whose delicate ecology is itself a form of scarcity.)”
Are these the challenges we will face in the future?
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