Wikipedia has this telling info on an outstanding and much awarded CIO in the United Kingdom Mr. J P Rangaswami. I am not drawing attention to him, but to his credo on handling information, which takes pride of place in the wikipedia piece, as of now. I do not know Mr. JPR and he has no reason whatsoever to know me. In the write up, I have changed the credo portion alone to italicized form .
JP Rangaswami (born 12 November 1957 in Calcutta, India) lived in Calcutta for half his life before emigrating to the United Kingdom. He studied Economics and Statistics at St. Xavier's College, University of Calcutta, specializing in developmental economics. Originally an economist and financial journalist, he has worked with technology in finance since 1980 with a number of large multinationals. He was named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine in 2003, and CIO Innovator of the Year by the European Technology Forum in 2004. In 2007, JP was selected as one of technology's 50 most influential individuals in the silicon.com Agenda Setters poll. JP was chosen for "vision and innovation rarely seen in CIOs." He is today Managing Director of BT Design for BT Group. Prior to joining BT in 2006, JP was Global CIO at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Arts and the British Computer Society.
JP is an outspoken advocate of open source and using emerging and disruptive technologies to improve information sharing, education and collaboration.
JP is also a popular and irrepressible blogger. On Confused of Calcutta he states the following credo:
- I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfillment and conversation. I believe that weaknesses and corruptions in our own thinking about digital rights and intellectual property rights will have the effect of slowing down or sometimes even blocking this from happening.
- I believe we keep building layers of lock-in that prevent information from flowing freely, and that we have a lot to learn about the right thing to do in this respect. I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly.
- I believe that we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying our access to the information; of assessing the quality of the information; of having better tools to visualise the information, to enrich and improve it, of passing the information on.
- I believe that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe's Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms rather than by complex inferences and abstract arguments.
- I believe that simplicity and convenience are important, and that we have to learn to respect human time.
- I believe we need to discuss these things and find ways of getting them right.
He is working on a book to be titled Fossil Fools.
JP and his wife, Shane, have three children: Orla, 21; Isaac, 15; and Hope, 9.
In the course of his review of David Weinberger's book 'Everything is miscellaneous' Mr. JPR refers to the Laws of Library Science attributed to the great librarian Prof. Ranganathan, as follows:
I was particularly taken with the stories related to S.R. Ranganathan and his Five Laws of Library Science (a term, incidentally, that he is credited with first using). Ranganathan’s Laws are:
- Books are for use
- Every reader his/her books
- Every book its readers
- Save the time of the reader; save the time of the library staff
- The library is a growing organism
When I first saw that, something strange stirred in me. I could imagine my maternal grandfather, Dr SV Anantakrishnan, saying just that, right down to the brusque to-the-point-ness. I was therefore completely unsurprised to find out that Ranganathan was, like my grandfather, also a Professor at Madras Christian College (where I holidayed, with my grandfather, every summer from 1961 to 1971 or so). So I will find out everything I can about the man who gave the world Colon Classification!
Two sets of values postulated in two different ages, both underlining simplification and making information truly available!
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written by P. Desikan, 2008-03-12 19:23:23
Even in my lay kind of browsing, I had not till now looked at the Gilder contribution.
Unlike Metcalfe's, both Moore's and Gilder's would seem to aid growth only because man commits himself to behaviour patterns that are expected of him. At least in an average scheme of things.
This is also why History seems to be repeating itself, as in the popular cliche.
Regards. Partha.
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written by dwai, 2008-03-12 09:28:30
To quote:
* Moore's Law: formulated by Gordon Moore of Intel in the early 70's - the processing power of a microchip doubles every 18 months; corollary, computers become faster and the price of a given level of computing power halves every 18 months.
* Gilder's Law: proposed by George Gilder, prolific author and prophet of the new technology age - the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months. New developments seem to confirm that bandwidth availability will continue to expand at a rate that supports Gilder's Law.
* Metcalfe's Law: attributed to Robert Metcalfe, originator of Ethernet and founder of 3COM: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes; so, as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows exponentially, while the cost per user remains the same or even reduces.
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written by P. Desikan, 2008-03-12 07:24:10
TO QUOTE JPR,
I believe that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe's Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms rather than by complex inferences and abstract arguments.
I said that JPR has no reason to know me. This is because what I know about cyberspace does not require any space.
JPR probably means that Laws such as Moore's and Metcalfe's seem to give us power over the growth since the growth can be quantitatively predicted.What btw is Gilder's Law?
Simplification can also result when increased accessing ease can reduce multi-point storage-retrieval options.JPR could be blessing efforts in such directions.
Even when I do not understand how any one will simplify, authenticate and ensure availability of information, it is easy for me to understand that all of this is desirable.
Many of you would know better.
Regards. Partha
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