"Simple" IT

One possible indication of the end of the Dark Age of IT will be that "complex" has a negative connotation and "simple" has a positive one when used in conjunction with IT products/services.

Seems like the labels we currently use to describe IT capabilities tend to be more ontological than epistemological....I suppose there are lots of potential reasons why...one might be that there's no end in sight to the ontological task of creating IT models of "the world."

NCW Update

Recently the Defense Business Board recommended that the Assistant SecDef's Networking and Information Integration (NII) office be eliminated. With that recommendation has come a new round of "death of NCW" commentaries (e.g., Lexington Institute, Wired).

I hesitate to comment on these since I've done so before...but, I feel obliged to make two observations:

• These critiques continue to either misunderstand or mischaracterize the nature of NCW. They create a techno-centric strawman, one that makes war deterministic and neat. This is wrong...NCW is more about cognitive and social factors than technology. The core of NCW is improving sensemaking and decision making, with technology only a tool. Large technology-rich armies and small technology-poor groups of insurgents can both operate in a net-centric fashion. See, as previously mentioned, "The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare", especially Figures 5 and 11.
• The US has a bias towards technology and formal processes. So, it's not surprising that the US implementation of NCW theory has largely ignored its social and cognitive aspects. And, it's not surprising that, as net-centric technologies and concepts became pervasive, a central office (NII) for their promulgation became largely irrelevant.