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Achieving Amenity
11/10/2004
On a less grand scale, the last decade or so has seen some pieces of "information technology" move from being perceived as such towards a state of amenity. In my own office, we've observed consciously the progression of our telephone system from something that IT was responsible for to something that general office operations is responsible for and I am sure most of my colleagues here don't often think of "telephone technology"--they just think of the telephone. Likewise, two other office stalwarts have moved beyond being "xerographic technology" or "laser printing" technology to the office amenities of photocopier and printer, and responsibility for those has also shifted from IT to office operations.
The most recent shift was responsibility for the local area network. Ten years ago it was a mysterious technology and crashed several times a week, requiring elaborate communications and support from a variety of people, inside and outside of the office. Now, I really can't recall it not working properly at any time in the past few years, and it is in a hybrid state, with responsibilities for it moving, as I write, from IT to office operations.
Norris' view, and that of his co-authors, is of a knowledge future where useful and meaningful access to information and knowledge is so infused into the environment that it's transparent, seamless, and most users don't even think of it as anything but just a part of their environment. His article, which I recommend, notes that--as William Gibson (one of my favorite authors) puts it--"the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed." In the article--and in a great deal more depth in his book, Transforming eKnowledge--Norris describes in vignettes some of the places where the technologies which will be knowledge and learning amenities in our future are in place and being used or developed now--after standards battles and commercial battles and maybe even cultural wars, of course.
The good news for people like me and you, is that no matter how fast new information technologies move into a state of amenity, there are likely to be new ones to speculate about. And we work on campus! Where not only is a lot of the new stuff happening, but where it is always a legitimate part of your job to think about such things.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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