Pivotal Technologies

There are many pivotal technologies evolving in industry today, but one particular piece of work that has been evolving at the MIT media labs is of particular interest to me. What impresses me the most is not the technology, but the approach to the technology. The approach is to bundle a group of technologies under a functional theme. In the case of this particular research project, the labs have given it the name of "Things That Think."

Defining pivotal technologies under a larger functional umbrella is a significant step forward in understanding the much larger ramifications of their impacts. In this particular case, when you begin to think about the ability of items, from clothing to fixtures, to monitor their environments as well as ours, everything we have around us takes on an interesting importance. The idea that at some point those things can talk back and "think" back is going to be one of our most incredible uses of technology for getting our organizations to the next level of performance.

For example, look at something simple like a shoe that is being experimented on by a number of sports organizations, in particular the NFL. The new shoe is "wired" to provide information about performance. The ability to analyze the performance of athletes in new ways boggles the mind. Impact, speed, performance, distance, and efficiency become new vocabulary words for watching the Sunday NFL games.

Taking this work a step further, some of the biggest breakthroughs in the area of "Things That Think" are occurring in the material manufacturing groups. As of this writing, a small group at Georgia Tech was making significant engineering progress on a wireless shirt. This shirt has the capability to monitor everything from blood pressure to other types of physical features of an individual. The ability of various healthcare organizations to take advantage of such data and begin real-time monitoring of people and their conditions is phenomenal. It's the next generation of what we might expect to see in new forms of remote health care and preventive medicine. Moves like these begin shifting our organizations to more far-reaching concepts, such as "real-time" business.

The other aspect of "theme" technology is the ability to combine various types of evolving technology into an integrated concept. The wider you can find an integration concept like the one above, the better the opportunity to develop a point of view around the conceptual integration. Seeking principles that apply to the opportunity becomes the next level of task. As the principles are derived, the opportunity allows the business leaders to explore their deep concerns about highly relevant management issues that otherwise would never have surfaced. Taking the opportunity to involve the senior leadership whenever appropriate in such planning exercises also allows them to develop an evolving sense of the opportunities that technology and business may present them. This technique also allows them to begin to grasp the complexities that have a high probability of accompanying the process changes needed to support the technological capabilities.

As technology continues to evolve into more complex and efficient propositions, there is a need to ponder the end state for the foreseeable future. Two of the most interesting questions are, "How fast and efficient can we really run a business? Where do the profound possibilities of combining more information-dependent processes and the Moore's Law effect of technology lead us?"

It is at this point that my stake stands in the ground. It is my belief that this is the guidepost for filtering what's on the horizon. The primary thesis that drives my long-term thinking revolves around how companies will begin functioning more and more in real time.