Technology Futures

Texas has a foot in the emerging Space Economy with the announcement that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, is planning a spaceport facility in southwest Texas.

Bezos is from nearby New Mexico, and has been working on this project from Seattle for several years. The most interesting part of this story is that the Bezos ranch, near El Paso, is not really that far from southern New Mexico's spaceport. The two locations are likely to form a "space tech" corridor that will fuel growth in the region for decades.

In yet another egregious example of an organization being hijacked by the IT folks, the FBI may have to scrap a brand new $170 million computer system because, get this, it doesn't work.

When these things happen, there is plenty of blame to go around. There are always at least three guilty parties.

• FBI upper management failed because they did not properly manage and oversee theie own internal IT staff, who had to have a major role in designing and specifying this system. Too many managers simply avoid tech issues because they feel they don't know enough about it and/or allow themselves to be intimidated by jargon-talking IT managers who deliberately obscure and complicate IT issues to keep upper management in the dark.
• The FBI's own IT department failed utterly. It certainly had the primary responsibility for oversight of the contractor-based project, and should have kept a close eye on the progress of the project. What happens, though, is that the internal IT folks become too cozy with the contract developer, and become vested in ensuring a "good" outcome--because they selected the vendor. If a project starts to go bad, it's very difficult to go back to your boss and say, "We picked the wrong guys to do this," or to say, "We did a lousy job of specifying what we needed." That's what has to happen, though. Because senior management avoids getting their hands dirty on IT projects, everyone looks the other way. In this case, the article describes it as a "slow motion train wreck," meaning everyone knew it was going to crash, but no one had the maturity to stand up and say so.
• The vendor failed. SAIC, a huge government contractor, will walk away with $170 million in taxpayer funds, and rest assured, they are already signing similar contracts with other Federal agencies. SAIC will claim, with some justification, that they were given inadequate specifications. But that's no excuse for failure to deliver, or to stop the process and say, "We need better specifications to complete this successfully."

If you find yourself talking to an IT person in your organization is using incomprehensible jargon, show them the door and tell them not to come back until they can talk in plain English. Ditto if you are talking to a vendor. There is absolutely no reason to let vendors confuse you with a lot of hard to understand buzz phrases. Disclaimer: Design Nine helps organizations spend their IT dollars wisely by providing indpendent advice and oversight on IT expenditures. If you are planning a sizable IT expenditure, get some advice from someone who does not stand to profit from running up the bill. And don't forget that internal IT departments too often gravitate toward complex, hard to maintain systems because it justifies a higher IT budget. Inexpensive, easy to maintain systems reduce IT costs. Why are so many IT departments so opposed to using Macs? Maybe it's because Macs need many fewer IT staffers to keep them up and running (documented in study after study).

USA Today has an article about Lafayette, Louisiana, which has been trying to put together a community fiber project for the past year. The southern Louisiana community has apparently been beaten down by BellSouth, which has vigorously opposed the deal.

BellSouth has claimed it is "unfair" for communities to offer a service the company could offer, even though it provides only DSL in the community, a pale shadow of the robust fiber network the city was planning.

At the risk of boring my regular readers, there are two ways to approach community telecom projects. One is to regard telecom infrastructure just like roads. Communities build the roads, but private companies (like BellSouth) deliver services (like dialtone or TV programming) to customers. The other approach is to regard telecom infrastructure like the municipal water or electric system, in which the city itself provides the customer services.

The latter is certainly more efficient, but given that many of our elected leaders still don't take any of this very seriously and given that we have a ridiculously complex regulatory environment, I think the former approach (a public/private partnership) is the only alternative.

Rightly or wrongly, communities that are trying to create public monopolies in this area are losing. The telecoms are outspending them and are buying whatever laws are needed to prevent community investments. But communities must invest to stay viable in the global economy, and Lafayette knows that. From the article:

"The future of Lafayette shouldn't be left to the whim of the big telecommunications companies, insists City Parish President Joey Durel. Installing fiber-optic cable, he credibly argues, is no different from laying down sidewalks or sewer lines.

In fact, the "triple play" plan mirrors the action Lafayette's city fathers took a century ago when they realized the private power companies were passing them by in favor of larger, more lucrative markets in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. To survive, they built their own municipal power system.

Now, city leaders say they need high-speed data pipelines to encourage a research park around the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Without them, the small businesses they hope to attract would turn away for lack of the tools they need.

The city also wants to feed those pipelines into the poorest housing projects in Lafayette as a way of breaking poverty cycles."

Lafayette has the right motivation. They just need to adjust the game plan. And not give up. It's too important.

A colleague sent me a link to another up and coming search engine called Vivisimo. It's a bit different than Snap, which I wrote about yesterday, but like Snap, it handles search results in a way that is genuinely useful, as compared to the typical "jillions of hits" Google result.

Vivisimo seems to do two things very well. First, it tries to identify the most likely results, rather than just returning all of them. Snap and Vivisimo both seem to give you about the same number results on a query, which is to say, many fewer than Google, and those returned are of higher quality.

Vivisimo also clusters results, which is really neat. A little expandable outline appears on the left, and clicking various branches of the tree returns subsets of the total set of results. It does this by looking at related words that do not appear in your query. You have to try it to appreciate it, but once you try it, I think you'll see what an improvement it is over Google.