We need to shift away from being an “always on” society.
This time ten years ago my boss was getting ready for another day at the BT Disruptive Innovation Lab at MIT, unaware of the disruption that was going to have them stranded at JFK for quite some time. I was sitting in BT Government’s Westminster office preparing to work on a collaboration with BT plc, MIT and the University of Cambridge.
This collaboration was to have a physical home in what looked like from the outside a non-descript industrial storage unit or an aircraft hanger. I don’t think, but can’t be sure, if “Building 52” was one of the original hangers from when Martlesham Heath was an airforce base (1917 to 1963). Once inside Building 52 this non-descript structure came to life. Buzzing with corporate innovators and intrapreneurs busy building and financing global businesses. This division of BT itself would soon be spun-out to become a successful part of NewVenture Partners. Building 52 also contained an office and home of the future; and a supermarket of the future in collaboration with Tesco plc. There was a real sense of excitement about creating the future. Indeed a favourite phrase of Graham Cosier, one of BT’s key visionaries, was “the future’s not what it used to be”. Meaning at best we were inventing the future or at least we were helping clients to prepare for disruptive change.
Long before 2001 the concept of an “Internet of Things” and the merging of “Bits and Atoms” was clearly understood in BT, primarily due to the vision of people like Nicholas Negroponte and Peter Cochrane. From a very practical engineering perspective this vision was about “IP over everything, everything over IP” and is visible today in the implementation and roll out of BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN). Making services like fibre optic home-broadband possible. If not yet available at my local exchange in Portobello 
BT’s 21st Century Network was a bold but necessary venture to take; and one which many people don’t fully appreciate the significance of. We are talking about the complete overhaul of systems that have been the cash-cow of a major UK PLC for the last six decades or more. Perhaps even back to the company’s foundations in 1846. This is a poignant example of BT plc responding to disruptive change as challengers like Skype™, Windows Live Messenger™ and FaceTime™ slowly start to eat into their core revenues, and would inevitably cannibalise them at some point soon.
Suppliers chosen to implement BT’s 21CN include Alcatel, Ciena, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Lucent, Siemens and a little company founded by some Stanford University computing operations staff called Cisco Systems, Inc.
BT have what is probably Europe’s largest single implementation of Cisco solutions. So it’s no surprise that there is common ground with what Cisco call “Borderless Networks”. The important connection here is that BT are busy building Internet Protocol based global infrastructure to reach you at home, at work and on the move (admittedly doing this more rapidly in some places than others), and Cisco are particularly interested in making everything work with IP within your built and organisational environments, both socially and professionally. Here’s an excerpt from what they call “Cisco Any Device”:
As the traditional corporate network perimeter continues to dissolve and the enterprise becomes more of a borderless environment, smartphones, tablets, other endpoint devices, and web applications are irreversibly changing the way people work and play online.
The “Internet of Things” and “Borderless Networks” that we are moving towards have been primarily driven by the needs and desires of human-to-human communication (e.g. making telephone calls, scientists sharing information via the World Wide Web). But now this new phase of “thing-to-thing” communication is being driven by the necessity for efficiency in terms of time, money and CO2. This is why I am hoping to spark collaboration between two bodies of academia in Scotland that are world-leading in their own domains, but have yet to get together on the concept of ‘Bits and Atoms”:
Fast forward a very short ten years from 2001, and we have seriously fueled an unhealthy “always-on culture” that was already well established back then (Lunch is for Losers 1980′s / Thatcher kind of thing). Perhaps driven by technology, perhaps driven by us trying to understand this turbulent world. Behaviours ranging from checking email and Twitter every fifteen minutes or less on our smartphones through the night (everyone has their fetch/push new data settings to fifteen minutes. Right?). To more serious wasteful behaviours such as having our work and living spaces lit, heated and air-conditioned when un-occupied.
Our society wastes an enormous amount of money and more importantly unnecessary carbon emissions, which will soon to equate to a triple waste of money as regulation and carbon taxes hit corporates and the cost of energy rises for consumers and businesses.
A step-change in the way we measure, manage and control our energy consumption is absolutely vital for economic and environmental reasons. From simple things like power for a desk-phone coming from its Ethernet connection (Power over Ethernet), through to systems for managing heat and ventilation based on real-time feedback, to even more complex Informatics giving insight to human-behaviour within the offices, shops, schools, hospitals, homes and everywhere else we live, work and socialise in.
One thing is clear: in the foreseeable global economic horizon, we do not have enough cash to keep powering our wasteful always-on culture through traditional methods. So we need to get smarter.
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p.s. I wrote this blog post partly inspired by memories of what I was doing 10 years ago on 11th September 2001. Nobody wishes commercial gain off the back of this anniversary, so if you liked this blog post, please consider making a donation to The Fire Fighters Charity, and support those in Scotland who risk every day, and often lose, their lives to keep us safe. Just as the brave fire fighters @FDNY did on that terrible day.
http://www.firefighterscharity.org.uk/donation.asp?PageId=91
