Making IT Better Expanding Information Technology Research to Meet Society's Needs (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-17
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The future of IT, and of the society it increasingly powers, depends on continued investments in research. Despite the incredible progress made over the past five decades, IT is anything but a mature, stable technology.
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The report recognizes that long-standing problems cannot be solved instantly, and it acknowledges the institutional, cultural, and resource factors that will make the recommended changes difficult to achieve. But after lengthy analysis and deliberation, the authoring committee concluded, with conviction, that a reorientation of IT research is vital to the well-being of the technology base.
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Industrial support for R&D also appears to be increasing dramatically. The combined R&D expenditures of companies in the six industry sectors most closely associated with IT totaled $52 billion in 1998, of which approximately $14 billion was classified as research.2 These figures compare to $39 billion and $8.5 billion, respectively, in 1995.3 Over the past decade, a number of large IT firms, including Microsoft Corporation, Motorola, Inc., and Intel Corporation, have
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Social applications of IT are expected to motivate technical research that will develop new capabilities to satisfy a growing set of societal needs, and they will demand that technological needs be considered in the social and organizational context in which they will be applied. Such work is by its very nature interdisciplinary, demanding insight into both the technical capabilities of IT and the ways in which people engage or are affected by IT systems in a variety of operational settings.
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But component research needs to be viewed as part of a much larger portfolio, in which it is complemented by research aimed directly at improving large-scale systems and the social applications of IT. The last of these includes some work (such as computersupported cooperative work and human-computer interaction)
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Research in these areas demands that researchers have access to operational large-scale systems or to testbeds that can mimic the performance of much larger systems. It requires additional funding to support sizable projects that allow multiple investigators to experiment with large IT systems and develop suitable testbeds and simulations for evaluating new approaches and that engage an unusually diverse range of parties.
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Recommendations for Government Recommendation 1. The federal government should continue to boost funding levels for fundamental information technology research, commensurate with the growing scope of research challenges.
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IT researchers corroborate this trend, noting that federally funded projects have become more focused on near-term objectives and demonstrations of capability precisely the same types of things that industry is likely to do rather than on fundamental advances in the technology. As shown in earlier CSTB reports, federal funding for fundamental research laid the groundwork for many of today's common commercial innovations, from graphical user interfaces and relational databases to computer graphics and even the Internet itself (CSTB, 1995, 1999~.
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The programs run by the organizations should complement one another and should together have the following characteristics: · Support both theoretical and experimental work; · Offer awards in a variety of sizes (small, medium, and large) to support individual investigators, small teams of researchers, and larger collaborations; · Investigate a range of approaches to large-scale systems problems, such as improved software design methodologies, system architecture, reusable code, and biological and economic models (see Chapter 3~; · Attempt to address the full scope of large-scale systems issues, including scalability, heterogeneity, trustworthiness, flexibility, and predictability;9 and · Give academic researchers some form of access to large-scale systems for studying and demonstrating new approaches.
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Research on the social applications of IT demands the perspectives of IT researchers, researchers in other academic disciplines, and end users of IT systems who are familiar with the particular challenges faced and the viability of different solutions. A number of programs are in place, such as the Digital Government program, the Digital Libraries Initiative, and the NSF's Computing and Social System program, that combine these perspectives and apply them to problem areas, but an initiative is needed that has a larger scale and scope and that possesses the following characteristics: · Support provided through a variety of research mechanisms, including single-investigator grants, small teams of researchers, and larger research centers that bring together researchers from several disciplines and different industries for an extended period of interaction; · Explicit participation in the research process of end users and systems integrators who understand the problems faced in using large-scale systems and social applications; · Participation of the federal agencies that are major users of IT systems and that invest considerable resources in the development of IT systems (such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Federal Aviation Administration)
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They are also able to complement this research with educational initiatives that can teach students about large-scale systems and social applications, thereby helping create a future workforce capable of researching, developing, and using them. For the most part, universities
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The first step should be to ensure that hiring, reviewing, and tenure processes are aligned to suit the interdisciplinary nature of the research that this report recommends and to ensure its quality. This can be accomplished through a variety of mechanisms, including the creation of interdisciplinary schools or departments that have their own hiring and promotion processes or the establishment of guidelines for evaluating faculty in traditional academic departments who pursue interdisciplinary work.
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Over time, they should become more directly involved, and some end-user organizations could even fund research for groups or centers whose capabilities match their needs. Recent research support by leading financial services firms shows it is possible to meaningfully engage end-user organizations, albeit on a limited scale.
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A FINAL WORD The committee believes that these recommendations will strengthen the nation's IT research base sufficiently to help meet society's growing need for, and dependence on, IT systems. By strengthening the existing mechanisms for IT research and experimenting with new mechanisms to expand IT research into large-scale systems and social applications of IT, the nation will be able to ease its transition to an information economy.
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in computer science and electrical engineering, the two academic disciplines most closely associated with information technology (IT)
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