Concepts:Let's start this week with another reference to Connections, by James Burke. Mr. Burke starts chapter ten in that book with a discussion that relates to this course. He asks why we look to the past when we wish to prepare for the future. We might reply that we look to the present as well, reviewing the efforts that people are currently undertaking to advance technology. His point is the basis for his book, that things happened in the past that we can examine and use to predict the future in similar circumstances. In his words, history is "a series of events triggered by recurring factors which manifest themselves as a product of human behavior". I think he means that if we examine history, we may determine that the pressure of human behaviors acted as a cause of particular kinds of innovation, and that similar human needs and resultant behaviors will trigger innovation again. By watching the technologies that the pressures act upon, we may be able to predict where an innovative use of technology is likely to occur.
In the photo on the right, we see two people who were very important to a particular technological innovation. The gentleman on our right is the one you may have heard of. His name is Alexander Graham Bell. Mr. Bell was a very remarkable man, who developed a working telephone, which became and continues to become very important to our lives. He was also involved in research into flight, and other technologies. The link above takes you to an interesting article about his life and career, including some quotes from him that will strike you as being very prophetic. He was also a teacher of the deaf. That is how he described himself throughout his life. There is a reason for that. The lady in the photograph is arguably the most important woman in the world, with regard to telephone technology. Her name is Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell. When she and Mr. Bell met, he was employed as a teacher of the deaf. Mabel Hubbard was one of his students. As you have guessed, they married, and the two little girls in the photo are their daughters. The technological benefits that Mr. Bell gave to the world, for which we will eternally owe him, grew from the fact that Mr. Bell loved Mrs. Bell. His work on the telephone, on a wireless telephone, on aeronautics, on everything he touched, grew from within him and from his love for her. We should be grateful to them both, and we should recognize the strength of purpose, of invention, of innovation that can come from the love someone can feel for the right person. Its strength as a factor of change varies from person to person. In some cases, it may be the strongest force at work in them and on them. Burke lists several factors that have led to innovation in the past, which he expects to occur again in the future:
We should all be able to feel the weight of the potential amount of information we could try to absorb from the media, the Internet, social networking, and traditional sources. We may also want to consider that many sources are doing less with more, that they are providing an introduction or an overview instead of a detailed view of any subject. News sources may provide teasers rather than in depth articles in order to cover more subjects and stories in a given space or time frame. This gives them a longer set of bullet points, but it does not give us the details that we would need to follow the examples in the third and fourth bullets above. We may have to do more digging in this information age than we thought we might. With regard to this class, we can consider the information above to be both a set of opportunities to watch for, and a warning that such opportunities tend to change the world. We can participate in those changes, or we can be affected by them, but sometimes it is impossible to ignore them. Events that change the world are not that uncommon. They will happen whether we are ready or not. In case you have never heard of it, a book published in 1972, Future Shock, discussed the problems people have with being given too much change, or too many changes at once. The link I have provided goes to an article written forty years later, that points out some of the things the authors of that book got right and wrong. Predicting the future is not easy, so we can forgive the authors for missing a few details. Some of the things they got right, however, are useful in our discussions about technology. From the article behind the link, some quotes from the book:
We should decide how we must react to changes in order to choose how we may act to take advantage of them. First, we must be aware of them, and Burke's framework for recognizing change gives us a perspective to do so. We must be aware of the things that change our world, because once it changes, we must decide how we will change with it. When your world changes, recognize that change, and become what you must become to love it, live with it, use it, or be used by it. Let's return to the RFP and see if we can apply some of our lessons to it. You should now have a copy of the business case for your RFP, as needed for your fictional company. You should also have created your list of technical requirements, which should help you to select the vendors from whom you would like to see proposals. The RFP must be sent as an invitation or posted as one in trade documents, to solicit interest and replies from responsible, acceptable vendors. For the purposes of this class, we will take the first approach, which may be the more commonly used approach for technical problems and solutions. The cost of posting an advertisement as long as your project would be prohibitive, and might invite a number of unacceptable responses. We will take the approach that you will select some number of potential vendors. This list should be at least three companies who might be able to produce the product you wish to obtain. The lesson above may lead you to modify some aspects of your RFP.
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