Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology R&D Ecosystem Retaining Leadership in an Increasingly Global Environment (2009) / Chapter Skim
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2 Information Technology: The Essential Enabler for the Information Society
2 Information Technology: The Essential Enabler for the Information Society
Pages 22-41
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From page 22... ...
Ibid., p. 9, citing National Research Council, Enhancing Productivity Growth in the In formation Age: Measuring and Sustaining the New Economy, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2007.
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From page 23... ...
Solow's often-quoted statement in 1987: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." In economics circles, this was known as the Solow productivity paradox. However, improvements in how the national income and product accounts are constructed have convincingly revealed IT's fundamental contributions to output and growth. The paradox is resolved.
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From page 24... ...
At the firm level, integrated supply chain management allows greater communication and coordination between customers and their suppliers, enabling the former to find the lowest-cost supplies subject to delivery constraints, reduce their inventories, and increase their overall production efficiency. These capabilities yield direct benefits to consumers, and not simply in terms of reduced costs.
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From page 25... ...
There is a strong correlation between those firms that are the most productive users of IT and those that place a high value on skilled workers, managers, and professionals, that is, on human capital.12 Data from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently rank information technology professions such as software engineer and systems administrator among those for which employment is projected to grow the fastest from 2006 to 2016.13 Undoubtedly IT will continue to be a growing contributor to GDP, but it takes time to reap its benefits in terms of products and organizations.
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From page 26... ...
economic growth.15 However, during the 1995-2000 boom period, labor productivity growth accelerated; even as IT investments slowed after 2000, labor productivity growth continued to increase even more rapidly through 2005.16 Jorgenson and coauthors traced this acceleration in labor productivity growth to a sharp rise in productivity growth in IT-intensive industries, principally in services, finding that the locus of innovation had shifted from IT-producing industries in manufacturing to IT-using industries in trade and services.17 The committee that authored the National Research Council's (NRC's) 14Erik Brynjolfsson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Information Technology and the Economy: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here?
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From page 27... ...
economic leadership in IT and contributed to productivity growth and market development in other sectors as well. But now, he argues, the United States may be well on its way to being a post-scientific society, in which market leadership and the creation of wealth depend less on scientific and technological fundamentals and more on integrating these creatively with a knowledge of organizations, business processes, and markets: In the post-scientific society, the creation of wealth and jobs based on innovation and new ideas will tend to draw less on the natural sciences and engineering and more on the organizational and social sciences, on the arts, on new business processes, and on meeting consumer needs based on niche production of specialized products and services in which 18National Research Council, Enhancing Productivity Growth in the Information Age: Measur ing and Sustaining the New Economy, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2007, p.
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For example, computer models, describing the quantum mechanical behavior at the atomic and molecular levels, allow scientists to simulate physical systems in detail, to understand physical phenomena better than is possible by theory or experimentation alone. Computer imaging, such as computed axial tomography (CAT)
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The most pressing problems to be solved by computational science are commonly known as Grand Challenges. In 1995, the National Research Council produced a report entitled Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure (commonly referred to as the Brooks-Sutherland report, after its co-chairs Frederick P
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Nevertheless, each depends on enormous advances in computation, storage, communications, and displays for its effective solution. Beyond more powerful computers and networks, NITRD identified the difficult computer technology components -- the so-called IT Hard Problems -- that require significant advancement in order to construct effective information-technology-based solutions to these societal challenges: new algorithms and capabilities for constructing applications, technologies to support complex heterogeneous systems, more capable hardware technologies, techniques and architectures to achieve high confidence in information technology systems, the architec 24See Networking and Information Technology Research and Development, Grand Challenges: Science, Engineering, and Societal Advances Requiring Networking and Information Technology Research and Development, Interagency Working Group on Information Technology Research and Development, available at http://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/200311_grand_ challenges.pdf; accessed October 28, 2008.
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Ho, and Kevin Stiroh, "Projecting Productivity Growth: Lessons from the U.S. Growth Resurgence," presentation to the Board of Trustees, Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds, Washington, D.C., November 7, 2002.
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From page 32... ...
The tire tracks figure also illustrated the complex interplay between industry, universities, and government -- the flow of ideas and people -- and the interdependencies of research advances in various subfields: there is a complex research ecology at work, in which concurrent advances in multiple subfields are mutually reinforcing, stimulating, and enabling one another. In 2003, the CSTB report Innovation in Information Technology27 distilled the lessons from eight prior CSTB studies28 and summarized the nature of innovation in information technology as understood circa 2003 (see Box 2.1)
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. -- The unanticipated results of research are often as important as the an ticipated results -- for example, electronic mail and instant messaging were by-products of research in the 1960s that was aimed at making it possible to share expensive computing resources among multiple simultaneous in teractive users.
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Atari, Nintendo, SGI, Pixar Internet ARPANET, Aloha, Internet Pup DECnet, TCP/IP LANs Rings, Hubnet Ethernet, Datakit, Autonet LANs, switched Ethernet Workstations Lisp machine, Stanford Xerox Alto Xerox Star, Apollo, Sun Graphical user interfaces Engelbart / Rochester Alto, Smalltalk Star, Mac, Microsoft VLSI design Berkeley, Caltech, MOSIS many RISC processors Berkeley, Stanford IBM 801 SUN, SGI, IBM, HP to World Wide Web 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2005 University Industry R&D Products $1 B market The topics are ordered roughly by increasing date of $1 B industry. Figure 2.1 The updated "tire tracks" diagram originally published in a 1995 report of the National Research Council to provide examples of government Figure 2-1a.eps sponsored information technology research and development in the creation of commercial products and industries.
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From page 35... ...
Source: Reprinted from National Research Council, Innovation in Information Technology, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2003. Updated and adapted from figure originally published in National Research Council, Evolving Figure 2-1b.eps the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1995.
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From page 36... ...
Grand Challenge in 2005, four cars successfully negotiated autonomously a difficult, 103-mile obstacle course in the Mojave Desert. In DARPA's 2007 Urban Challenge, autonomous vehicles performed such maneuvers as merging, passing, negotiating intersections, and parking in a simulated urban environment at the former George Air Force Base in California.
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From page 37... ...
experimental infrastructure project were established to work on these and related challenges.33 The Personal Memex In his seminal 1945 paper "As We May Think,"34 Vannevar Bush described the Memex, a device that would store all information relevant to an individual and which could be searched using spoken commands. Dramatic advances in storage are on the verge of making the Memex feasible in terms of cost and size.
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From page 38... ...
Although information technology is not a panacea for all of the shortfalls associated with the nation's educational system, IT nonetheless offers the potential not only for significantly enhancing learning for all learners, but also for transforming the way that people learn. Coupling educational practice and educational technology with recent advances in the learning sciences -- that 35These topics are being addressed by a National Research Council study being conducted by the Committee on Sustaining Growth in Computing Performance.
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From page 39... ...
The situation is incon 36See, for example, National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 2000. 37See National Research Council, Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2007.
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From page 40... ...
These are special situations, though; for the typical home or business desktop system or server facility, the costs of ownership -- and the risks -- continue to be far too great. A "grand challenge" in computer systems for the next decade is to reduce these costs and risks -- to make as much progress on security, privacy, dependability, and ease of use as has been made on increasing computing performance.38 Transforming the Developing World One of the greatest available opportunities for fostering economic growth and security for the United States is to improve the status of the several billion people on the planet currently living in poverty.
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Driving Advances in All Fields of Science and Engineering The role of simulation, enabled by advances in high performance computing, in driving advances in all fields of science and engineering is well documented. Today though, we are seeing the emergence of a new form of computational science: one focused on the collection of massive amounts of data from sensors in the world around us and aided by advances in techniques for storing, retrieving, mining, visualizing, and discovering knowledge in those data.
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