Information Technology Research Update by Diomidis Spinellis Department of Management Science and Technology Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ Volume 1 : Issue 1 December 12th, 2001 A free periodic newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, news, and commentaries on information technology research. In this issue: - Peter Drucker "The Next Society" - Three New Research Outlets - Information Retrieval on the Web - Microsoft Press Books Peter Drucker "The Next Society" -------------------------------- Peter Drucker published by invitation a 22 page survey titled "The Next Society" on the November 3rd issue of The Economist. It is worth reading as a whole, the following is my personal impression of its most interesting points. The future will be shaped by changing demographics (an older population), the knowledge workers, and a relative decrease of the importance of the manufacturing sector. New ways of working with people at arm's length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organisations. The new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. Surprisingly, Drucker believes that the most striking growth will involve "knowledge technologists" computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, paralegals defining knowledge workers to be people whose jobs require formal and advanced schooling (contrast them with agricultural and manufacturing workers). In the USA they outnumber factory workers by two to one. As knowledge has become the key scarce resource, knowledge workers are becoming the new capitalists. Given however the psychological pressures and emotional traumas many knowledge workers suffer in the upward mobility rat race, a growing number of them "plateau" in their 40s having achieved all they wished. To avoid this they need to establish, while still young, an non-competitive life and community of their own. Following the trends of the agricultural sector, manufacturing will decline as a percent of each country's GDP though still increase in absolute terms. The change will be reflected in employment figures. The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods has fallen by three quarters in the past 40 years. As a result, in the year 2000 it took five times as many units of manufactured goods to buy the main knowledge products as it had done 40 years earlier. Politically, the shrinking of the manufacturing sector is likely to create a new wave of protectionism. The corresponding change in the corporations will mean that these will be likely to be held together by strategy (alliances, joint ventures, minority stakes), rather than by ownership. Research directors and high-tech industrialists, now tend to believe that the company-owned research lab, has become obsolete. Increasingly, therefore, the development and growth of a business is taking place through partnerships and know-how agreements with institutions in different industries and with a different technology. Despite all the talk of "knowledge management" no one yet really knows how to do it. The management of knowledge workers should be based on the assumption that the organisation needs them more than they need the organisation, since they have both the mobility and the confidence to do so. Therefore, knowledge workers have to be treated and managed as volunteers. They need to know where the company is going, they are interested in personal achievement and responsibility, expecting continuous learning and training. They also expect respect for their area of knowledge. That it takes a genius today to be the boss of a big organisation clearly indicates that top management is in crisis. In the next society the biggest challenge for the large company may be its vision. Increasingly, in the next society's corporation, top management will be the company since everything else can be outsourced. In the next society IT will be important, but it will be only one of several important new technologies. Te central feature of the next society will be new institutions, new theories, ideologies, and problems. Three New Research Outlets -------------------------- The IEEE Computer Society has launched two new publications for mobile, wireless, and distributed applications: - IEEE Pervasive Computing (topics of interest include intelligent vehicles and environments, pervasive computing applications) http://computer.org/pervasive - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing http://computer.org/tmc Not to be left behind, ACM launched the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology; the first issue was released in August 2001 and includes articles on Web searching, the scalability of a large web-based shopping system, and the storage of XML documents in RDBMSs. http://www.acm.org/toit/ These journals match the research profile of many ongoing research projects and PhD work I am aware of. Consider them as publication outlets, particularly for polished high-quality conference papers. Contact me if you want to discuss a publication idea. Information Retrieval on the Web -------------------------------- The following survey from the "ACM Computing Surveys" addresses succinctly all aspects of Information Retrieval on the Web. Use its taxonomy on your own work, or reference it to avoid repeating its contents. @Article{KT00, Author="M. Kobayashi K. Takeda", Title="Information Retrieval on the {Web}", Journal="ACM Computing Surveys", Month=jun, Volume=32, Number=2, Pages="144--173", Year=2000, } Microsoft Press Books --------------------- Following a relationship we have established with Microsoft we received the following books which have are available at the eLTRUN (E) or the DMST Educational Lab (D) library: - Inside C# (E) - Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Technical Reference (E) - Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with XML (E) - Developing XML Solutions (D) - XML in Action (D) - XML Step by Step (D) - Introducing Microsoft . Net (E) - SQL Server 2000 - Performance Tuning (E)