I have been asked to reveal what are my "business objectives" for this blog. Here they are.
In the past I have done consulting in the realm of IT, mostly in recent years as a system architect or strategic IT adviser. For almost the past three years I shifted gears and went to work for the University of Michigan Medical School as a way to break into the field of healthcare IT, and in particular clinical research IT. I am also pursuing a Master of Science in Information degree from the U-M School of Information, because I am eager to further my knowledge of human-computer interface design and the sociology and psychology of computer-supported collaborative work.
In my "spare time" for the last decade I have devoted a lot of time to looking into the future of IT in general. In that pursuit I have spent time learning about scenario planning and making some attempts at applying its techniques to this area. One result of that effort was a paper I wrote in 2001 and rewrote in 2002 after the 9-11 affair. That paper was called Rogue Wave: The Synergistic Convergence of Multiple Disruptive Information Technologies (PDF) As the title indicates, I believe we are on the cusp of a radical paradigm shift that will affect every aspect of our lives and the lives of our descendants.
As the title also indicates, I have been struggling with the concept of disruptive technologies put forth by Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School. This paper reflects my understanding of those concepts at the time and is flawed in this respect, but I still believe the premise is true: the plethora of information technologies unfolding before us is undermining and disrupting every aspect of society. These changes often verge on the miraculous, but they have a dark side which we are only beginning to explore. I am interested in both the dark and light sides, am convinced there is no single inevitable outcome of this paradigm shift, and believe there is little we as individuals can do to affect the ultimate outcome globally but much we can do in our own lives and communities. I define "communities" to include online communities, which for many of us are becoming as real as or more real than our face-to-face social relations.
Bottom line: My business objective here is to rekindle my consulting career with the focus shifted to strategic analysis of the future effects of the above-described paradigm shift, in particular in the area of biomedical research IT.
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