JP Rangaswami is the CIO and Chief Scientist at British Telecom

Background:

[These are my quick notes, complete with  (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error.  Please excuse those. Thanks!

From time to time, I'll insert my own editorial comments - exercising the prerogatives of the blogger.  I'll show those in brackets. ]

Notes:

• What’s the challenge for the next seven years?
  • The loss of control
    • The organization has to design for a loss of control
    • IT is facing loss of control too. The age of the locked down desktop is ending. Now users can bring their own tools to the office.
    • It’s easy to admit we’ve lost control of the device – much harder to face the implications of losing control of the data.
    • The act of trying to restrict/control something that is meant to be abundant results in an equal and greater effort to restore abundance. E.g., wikileaks.
    • Once info is made digital, it will leak.
  • The loss of the understanding of where the boundaries of the enterprise are
    • Consider what percentagge of emails actually leave your organization
    • Everything that happens inside the organization is cost – to raise revenue, you need to interact outside the organization
    • In this context, why do we spend so much time and money to keep information inside?

    The loss of of intelligence

    • Are these tools making us dumb?
    • Are the tools making organizations dumb? Are we providing tools that prevent true comprehension? E.g., PowerPoint anyone?
    • Does an individual lose personal skills while gaining the skills of the collective?
    • How do we design for collective expertise?