Smith
Professor Sandy Boyson Co-authors
Chapter of Prestigious World Economic
Forum Report with Avaya
Boyson Urges Nations to Better
Leverage Communications Advances
in Global Information Technology Report
2007-2008
Smith
School thought leadership and research
is prominently featured in the World
Economic Forum’s annual Global
Information Technology Report, released
on April 9, 2008. Within the report
Sandor Boyson, co-director of the
Supply Chain Management
Center at the University of
Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of
Business, and co-author David Boyer, a
research scientist with Avaya Labs,
offer a blueprint for nations to better
leverage emerging communications
capabilities and technologies to spur
economic and social development.
Each year the report includes essays
written by leading practitioners,
scholars and experts to offer a global
view of information communication
technology strengths, weaknesses, and
progress. Boyson’s chapter “Unified
Communications: Leading Advances in
Global Decision Making and Economic
Development” applies findings from
Smith-Avaya joint research and industry
advances to offer insight into unified
communications–led development – which
the researchers present as a new
national readiness and economic catalyst
model.
Boyson offers the idea of unified
communications – or being able to
simultaneously manage data, video, and
voice traffic, from the network and
user’s perspective – as a breakthrough
and surge in momentum in “an ongoing
200-year-old communications revolution.”
“Among the implications is the
creation of a revolutionary services
platform capable of orchestrating
processes and people on a scale never
before seen. This is a step-change in
technological capability that will truly
marry human intelligence with network
intelligence,” said Boyson. “Unified
communications – enabled choreographies
present great advances in orchestrating
end-to-end business processes and people
in real time – what our industry partner
Avaya calls communications-enabled
business process. They open up the
possibilities for an unprecedented scale
of coordinated actions in business,
government and society.”
In the paper, the authors outline
exciting future possibilities and
scenarios such as mobile phones that
could monitor a user’s vital signs in
real-time, to then beam to an on-call
health care provider; oil pipelines that
could automatically communicate
diagnostic information to technicians;
and disaster watch systems that identify
imminent danger and trigger alerts to
emergency authorities and first
responders, as well as simultaneously
send warning messages to individual
computers and mobile phones.
In looking toward the future, Boyson
advises that public and private
leadership will need to form a national
unified communications vision and
leadership group responsible for
formulating and steering a multifaceted
policy agenda. The focus, he says, will
be on maximizing market potential to
deliver broad penetration of unified
communications services at the lowest
possible price.
“Government and industry need to
mobilize formal business value networks
– much as the United States’ RosettaNet
or Singapore’s TradeNet did in a
previous technology era – that can bring
together affiliated companies to
collaborate on unified communications
rule sets and end-to-end
choreographies,” said Boyson
The Smith School and Avaya share a
long history of collaborative research
that includes groundbreaking work
extending communications in radio
frequency identification (RFID) sensor
networks into supply chain management
and healthcare scenarios, transforming
business processes for the banking
industry, and in pioneering
event-triggered conferencing for crisis
situations.
Read more at:
http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gitr/2008/Contents.pdf.
▓ Angela
Toda, Office of Marketing Communications
