If you thought the Industrial Revolution was disruptive, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” With the advent of ubiquitous and inexpensive digital capability and capacity, the world, argues Harvard professor Yochai Benkler in his book, The Wealth of Networks, is rapidly exiting the Industrial Information Economy. This economy merely placed an information layer atop the hard goods-based Industrial Economy. The world is now hurtling full force into a Networked Information Economy, where value is found predominantly in the production, enhancement and sharing of informational content (for example, financial services, accounting, software, science, ideas, designs, opinions) and cultural content (for example, movies, books, music).
During the Forum, we will discuss digital disruptions that are contributing in substantial ways to the Networked Information Economy, rapidly impacting today’s business models and doing so at accelerating rates. These disruptions cover: new media, virtual worlds, social power, information transparency, digital spectrum, new platforms and smart(er) everything.
These disruptions are the culmination of a year-long research effort by the LEF that will result in the Digital Disruptions research report in the fall. The forum debuts this research. May you live in exciting times!
Session topics include:
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Digital Disruptions – The LEF’s year-long research effort on digital disruptions explored seven trends, which are the basis of this forum: New Media, Living in a New Reality, Social Power, Information Transparency, New Wave of Waves, Platform Makeover and Smart(er) World. These trends challenge the status quo like never before and support the move to a Networked Information Economy (Yochai Benkler).
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Video for the Masses – With YouTube and video sharing a way of life, enterprises are looking to video as just another data type to reach their audience, often younger, in new and viral ways. What are some of the tools and strategies used to leverage video in the enterprise?
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Second Life as a Way of Life – See how enterprises are delving into virtual worlds not only for town hall meetings but also for space landings, where the public can participate in real time and have a personal connection to NASA like never before. What can you do in a virtual world that you can’t do in the real world?
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Virtual Worlds in the Enterprise – Some virtual worlds, like Qwaq Forums, are modeled on the office and focus on business use. CSC conducted a pilot with Qwaq Forums for secure business collaboration and learning behind the firewall, and as a way to engage the Millennials entering the workforce. Learn what we learned.
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Social Power: Bringing It All Together – Enterprises are using social networking software to improve communication and information flow across departments and locations. Social networking software is at the intersection of content and people, helping discern what’s most relevant to whom, and can include tacitly built profiles, social network graphs, communities, advanced tagging and tag clouds, RSS feeds, subscriptions and management, notifications, and colleague tracking.
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Social Power and Enterprise
Responsibility – Organizations need to establish guidelines to ensure responsible use of social networking tools. This includes guidelines for appropriate use, transparency, proprietary and confidential information, regulatory compliance, legal discovery and employee privacy. Tap the power of your people, responsibly.
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How Transparency and the Internet will Transform Healthcare – The healthcare system is poised to become more effective and efficient through better information transparency from longitudinal electronic health records, intelligence systems, advanced data mining and improved connectivity. The goal: Deliver better information for better decisions, saving lives and money.
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Towards High Speed Wireless Ubiquity and Openness
–The race is on towards large-scale broadband wireless networks, with players jockeying for position in the words of WiMAX, LTE and federated Wi-Fi, and new innovations expected in the recently deregulated 700 MHz band.
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Software Defined Radio – SDR makes it possible to end the decades-old practice of spectrum allocation, ushering in a new world of dynamic digital spectrum. SDR enables moving to different frequencies and modulations via software, and its child, cognitive radio, allows negotiating spectrum on the fly as needed. SDR is a major game-changer, on par with the telephone and automobile.
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Parallelism for the Masses – With the advent of multicore processing, parallelism must go mainstream to take advantage of the multiple core processors at our disposal (even in the Playstation 3). Parallelism is no longer confined to high performance computing but must serve a broader general-purpose market; tools are emerging that close the gap between hardware potential and software performance using parallelism techniques.
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Quantum: SciFi or Something More? – Although quantum computing is still in the research stage, we are getting closer to seeing small quantum computers running in labs and commercial research projects, even this year. Once the technology scales, it will be able to solve very hard problems beyond the scope of traditional high performance computing systems.
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Smarter with Semantics – Enterprises are leveraging semantic technology to make better use of existing data and services, connecting the dots based on meaning and context. The result: A shift from information- to knowledge-centric computing, and an eventual evolution from Web 3.0 (Semantic Web, connecting knowledge) to Web 4.0 (Ubiquitous Web, connecting intelligence).
Please contact your CSC Account Executive for more information or e-mail Kristi Hughes at khughes5@csc.com