Conference turris::womannotes-v2

463.0. "Roger Heinen at Dexpo" by ULTRA::ZURKO (Words like winter snowflakes) Wed Feb 22 1989 10:15

My ears perked up when I read 'empowerment'. It's one of those words that I
_really_ like the sound and feel of, but am not quite sure I could write a
dictionary definition.

On reading, I began to think more and more that the _technical_ direction DEC
takes is one of the reasons that its _environment_ is so right for me. Or maybe
it's the other way around.
	Mez


    EMPOWERMENT, NOT POWER: DIGITAL AND COMPUTING IN THE 1990s


                      DEXPO KEYNOTE ADDRESS
                           DELIVERED BY

                           ROGER HEINEN
                  CORPORATE CONSULTING ENGINEER,
                   DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
                 NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 9, 1989




    EMPOWERMENT, NOT POWER: DIGITAL AND COMPUTING IN THE 1990s

Thank you, and good afternoon.

I am very pleased to be here today, and to be the first representative of 
Digital to deliver a keynote address at DEXPO. DEXPO has come a long way since 
the first time I visited, when it took place under a rented circus tent in the 
parking lot outside DECUS.

Being here today presents a number of challenges for me.  The first is the 
diversity of the audience.  There are Digital customers here, marketing 
partners, end users, third party vendors, those desperately wishing Digital to 
succeed, and those desperately ambivalent about whether Digital succeeds or 
not. Presenting a vision of Digital and computing in the 1990s that can speak 
to this diversity is a challenge.

And, of course, there are also those who would have preferred Ken 
Olsen to give this address, certainly creating a challenge for me.  On the 
other hand, there are those who heard yesterday's talk and think Ken Olsen 
was already well represented.  Perhaps I am a welcome change.

One thing I think we can all agree on about Ken is this: Not only has he 
been a visionary, but he has been a "practical" visionary.  This is also a 
good description of Digital, which has shown that it can translate a vision 
of computing into actual products.  That has required us to be farsighted, 
seeing all the twists and turns, planning for the unexpected, but all in a 
very down- to- earth way.  At Digital, we define farsightedness as someone 
who goes into a restaurant and orders three eggs, two for their plate and 
one for their shirt.

Well, before I wind up with three eggs on my shirt, and none on the plate, I'd 
like to address the topic of today's discussion.

My starting point is a recent comment on the future of computing by Bill Joy of 
Sun Microsystems that was picked up by the press and widely reported.  Bill Joy 
was quoted as saying that the future of computing would be 100 MIPS on the 
desktop by 1990. This may well be an accurate prediction of the future. But it 
is indicative of a narrow view of the future of information technology -- a 
viewpoint that plagues our industry.

The thrust of this address is a very simple response to that quote - 
contrasting the future as Digital is creating it - to the common industry 
perception that raw power by itself is the future.  It is not.  We believe that 
the true power of information technology does not lie in the power of hardware, 
but in the empowerment of the individual.

The real issue that has to be addressed, is not how much raw power the industry 
will supply for the desktop, but what customers are going to do with it.

Any view of the future that doesn't take into account what people actually use 
technology for is technologically nearsighted.  In contrast, a farsighted view 
of the future incorporates the needs of the individual as well as the thrust of 
future technology.

Today, I will examine the vision underlying the products Digital is building 
for the future, give an example of this vision at work, and talk about the 
implications for industry issues arising from that example, such as standards 
and the importance of third party vendors.

Talking about the future is always risky business. It is so easy to sound 
like you know what you are talking about, proclaiming the era of 100 MIPS on 
the desktop, for example, but so hard to be right.  Napoleon, who at one time 
thought himself the wave of the future, was once quoted as saying that "The 
stupid speak of the past, the wise the present, fools of the future."

But we have no choice; we must speak of the future.  We are either going to 
make the future or be made by it.  The challenge that we face is to avoid 
the trap of technological futurism, of creating beautiful, sophisticated, 
technologically astute hardware, which no one has any use for.

I have brought along a brief video that I hope will provide some perspective on 
just how common this trap really is.

_________________________________________________________________

                              VIDEO 
_________________________________________________________________

As you can see, it is very easy to make mistakes predicting a future solely on 
the basis of technology.  Those of us who create and produce technology all too 
easily forget why it is that the users of technology need it in the first 
place, and what the challenges are for individuals and organizations that have 
to absorb new technology.

For the individual, knowledge is what drives progress.  Today, this is coming 
to mean a network of shared knowledge, not just information, but shared 
knowledge - across and within enterprises.  It is when you take information in, 
and add your own unique value, either as an organization within a network or as 
an individual within an organization - sending it out enhanced by your own 
added personal value - that you are turning information into knowledge.  And 
creating knowledge is an act of power.

Computers have come to play a key supporting role.  They can empower the 
individual to create knowledge.  Having lots of MIPS by themselves is no 
guarantor of that capability.

This may seem like an obvious point - nonetheless, as I hoped the video 
suggested in a fairly lighthearted way, it is very easy to be seduced by the 
narrow emphasis on hardware speed rather than systems that enhance individual 
performance.

When we get caught up in a MIPs mentality and lose the forest for the trees - 
we are guilty of technological nearsightedness, of technology for technology's 
sake.  There's a very short future in that direction.

Instead of taking our own technological prowess and projecting it into the 
future - we must adapt our technology to meet the organizational, economic, and 
cultural challenges that shape the way individuals will adapt to new technology 
and eventually use information to create knowledge.  This means creating 
farsighted technology that empowers people to do what they do more effectively.

This farsighted technology must address how people actually work, what their 
jobs are, how they're structured, what they're job tasks are, the 
interrelationships of jobs.

It must also address how work is organized across an enterprise, and the 
cultural milieu in which people work.  IBM's hierarchical computing was 
perfectly adapted to the hierarchical structure that dominated American 
organizations of the 50's and 60's. Today's more decentralized organizations 
require computing that is truly peer-to-peer. And the industry is rushing to 
fill this need.

And, this technology must be economically feasible for the individual or the 
enterprise.  This means more than having reasonable price performance, although 
the reason there is not an airplane in every home as was once predicted is 
exactly price performance.  The economic challenge also means being able to 
balance the need to preserve your customer's investment with the customer's 
need to stay competitive and abreast of technology. And it means genuinely 
understanding your customer's business. They might be in a different business 
than you think.

For example, the President of a major airline, when asked who was his major 
competitor, said "The phone company."  Why the phone company?  The reason, he 
said, was that he is in the business of improving interpersonal communication 
by bringing people together.  And so is the phone company.  Technological 
farsightedness means being at least as sophisticated about your customer's 
business as they are.

For those of us who live and breathe computers, it is no surprise we see the 
future as technology, technology, and more technology. It's where we feel 
secure.

Understanding our customers, how they organize work to create knowledge, the 
cultures they operate in, and the business they do, and building technology 
based on that understanding is moving ourselves onto a turf we may not be 
familiar with or feel comfortable on.  Creating 100 MIPS on the desktop is 
purely a technical challenge - creating a system designed to empower 
the...banker, for example, can, for the producer of technology, also be a 
psychological challenge.

It is precisely in creating systems that empower individuals where they work 
that Digital has chosen to focus its future. We're committed to putting the 
most MIPS on the desktop - that's not a problem.  But we're betting our company 
that the future is not in powering the hardware, but in empowering the 
individual.

Let me give you an example of something we are working on - the corporate 
banker's workbench.

Banking is undergoing a major shift these days, and bankers are entering a new 
world.  Formerly account managers or loan officers - bankers are being called 
upon to become credit analysts, account planners, and salesmen responsible for 
new business development.  For bankers, this is a fundamental shift, and 
information technology is the key to making it work.

A banker's workbench combines office automation with service delivery - 
providing tools for account planning, credit analysis, relationship management, 
and customer service, unified by a visually sophisticated user interface, like 
DECwindows.  It empowers the banker's ability to structure credits, package 
products, create and submit proposals, and identify and evaluate opportunities.
In other words, to win business.

To offer a successful banker's workbench, Digital must produce products 
based on what is best in our technology in a manner that addresses the needs 
of bankers in their own particular organization, culture, and economy.  That 
is why each banker's workbench is geared to the unique focus of different 
banks, and different departments within the same bank.

The key to the corporate banker's workbench is that it is not a packaged 
solution system, complete with part numbers.  Instead it is an architecture or 
platform, a set of tools and technologies integrated by Digital, then networked 
to various third party applications, information sources or production systems.

And where does our infamous 100 MIPS fit into a banker's workbench?  Almost 
anywhere.  These systems will require lots of distributed computing power, lots 
of file servers, lots of desktop devices, and lots of very smart software.

It might mean 100 or more MIPS right on the banker's desk.  Or it might be 100 
MIPS distributed on the network, 20 here, 2 there, 10 there.

Digital is concentrating its investments on building better components, more 
intelligent data routing and better storage within the network.  We will do the 
systems integration and provide the platform so that smaller companies with 
intelligent solutions to specific banking problems can concentrate on what they 
do best and not have to invent the "hard" stuff.

If that is what Digital is going to do in the future, and I believe that will 
be the case, this has some important implications for the kind of company that 
we are.

The first and most obvious implication is that Digital can't do it alone.  
Digital already has very broad relationships with third parties, but if success 
in the 1990s means offering the banker's workbench, or the chemist's workbench, 
or the executive decision support workbench, then the level of cooperation, 
integration, and business partnership with third parties will require an 
unprecedented level of intensity.  It might not be too far off to suggest that 
the future of our industry is less dependent on who builds the first 100 MIPS 
for the desk, then on who can best integrate effective platforms with 
job-specific applications.

Digital is known for this, and our recent announcements reinforce this.  The 
result can be the difference between night and day.

Here's a short video that shows the difference between computing chaos and 
harmonious computing... 
_________________________________________________________________


                              Video 
_________________________________________________________________

I could not resist showing that video today - it shows just what I am talking 
about - results, not hardware specs.

As Digital turns its focus to creating and integrating effective customers 
solutions, two things become vitally important - standards and architecture.

Let's talk about our architecture first.

Digital's success has been built on its single system architecture - VAX and 
VMS - the result of a vision of computing that not only included a compatible 
product range, but pervasive, consistent networking and distributed computing.  
All oriented toward empowering the individual in an enterprise.

When we talk about a unified system architecture today, we are talking about 
substantially more than just VAX and VMS.  Our system architecture now 
addresses the customer's overall enterprise.  It includes hardware and the 
operating system, but also networking, data management, application 
integration, and core applications as well.

By concentrating on a layered architecture, we can change or evolve a single 
component independently of the others.  For instance, we can replace DEcnet 
with DECnet/OSI.

It also means we can introduce new, parallel components to address the need for 
open systems standards and new technology while still providing continuity with 
other components where customers may have made major investments.

Our product announcements last month show Digital's architecture at work - we 
expanded our VAX line and introduced dramatically more competitive VAX/VMS 
workstations.  We also introduced a stunning new line of ULTRIX-based RISC 
systems - the DECstation 3100s.

We were able to replace older components and introduce new ones without 
breaking the architectural principles that our customers have come to depend 
on.

We also set the benchmark for user interface technology, and introduced our 
DECwindows software architecture - the industry's best implementation of the X 
Window standard from MIT.

Digital's focus on a unified system architecture makes these changes possible 
without the radical overhaul so many of our competitors and their customers 
must go through with the introduction of new systems.  The unified system 
architecture also provides the platform for the developments of the 90s.

The lesson is that those of us who are technology producers can go a long way 
to helping our customers meet the challenge of absorbing technology by the very 
way we produce our technology. When Digital has made mistakes, and like any 
company that has been around as long as we have, we have made mistakes, it has 
often been when we remembered our architecture but forgot the challenges our 
customers face.

We know better today.

If focusing on the system as a whole, rather than on hardware by itself, is 
more empowering to individuals, we can see an obvious narrowness 
of the 100 mips vision.  If CPUs reach 100 MIPs, but networks, data management 
level, application interface, and core applications can't take advantage of it 
- you've don't have a balanced architecture.  It is the equivalent of cars 
with 1000 horsepower engines in a society where the speed limit is 55.  It is 
not going to get you from this pier out to LaGuardia or Kennedy airport one 
iota faster.

Intellectually, we all know this, but practically it has been difficult to 
absorb.  This problem happens all the time. Recently, I was listening to the 
National Public Radio Car Repair Show - featuring those wonderful very funny 
brothers, Click and Clack - the tappet brothers - as they call themselves.  A 
man called up and wanted to know why his Japanese car was only getting 20,000 
miles between clutches, and more recently 13,000 miles between clutch changes.  
They told the poor fellow two things.  First, they said, he didn't know how to 
drive using a clutch.  They also told him that the engine in his is much more 
powerful than the little clutch plate was designed for - not a balanced system.

If together we are going to supply farsighted technology that is delivered in 
balanced systems for multicultural customers... we must have standards.  When 
technology makes it possible, standards are good for the industry.  Standards 
allow Digital to work on things that are truly unique, where standards haven't 
been fully defined and where our innovation can make an impact and add value. 
Without standards, we would all have to invest in everything, and that would 
inhibit the progress and development of technology.

There are many of you who believe that standards level the playing field, and 
will open the door to the Japanese.  Now, we're worried about the 
competitiveness of Japanese companies, too, but we believe standards simplify 
the playing field, and provide a springboard to innovation.  There are hundreds 
of ways to add innovation to standards:  you can implement the standard better, 
deliver it better, deliver more standards, improve upon the standard.

For example, Digital has created a Digital Compound Architecture that is a 
significant improvment on the international standard ODA.

Creating a Compound Document Architecture is a non-trivial task - it's harder 
to do than building a 100 Mips processor. It is the ability to bring together 
in a single document image, voice, data, graphs, tables and so forth. With the 
Digital Compound Architecture, each of the data elements in specialized formats 
can reside on different places on the system or network, and don't come 
together as an informational entity - a document - until they are printed or 
you need them on the screen.  So if the data changes for my spread sheet, for 
example, when I view it on the screen I see the updated data - when I send it 
to a printer tomorrow, I'll get tomorrow's newest data - its a "live" document.
That is hard to do.

But that is the future for Digital - doing the "hard stuff" - building 
platforms for third parties based on the effective use of standards.  Can we be 
successful with this approach?  Yes!  We believe our future added value will 
count in the same way our innovations to the X Window standard through our 
DECwindows toolkit counted when it was picked by the Open Software Foundation 
to provide the backbone of its standard user interface - OSF/Motif.  We knew we 
had produced a winning, farsighted technology because it addressed the needs of 
applications writers  by being based on a standard.  DECwindows by itself has
no content - it is a  vehicle - a platform on which applications developers and
end users can do a tango for two.

By providing for the "hard stuff" - the integration environment, the compound 
document architecture, the user interface, the network, and if 100 MIPS on the 
desktop is essential, that, too-- we have cleared the way for others to provide 
the business solutions that they do best.  Then together, we can build a
banker's workbench or any other sort of workbench - systems that empower
individuals and meet real organizational, cultural, and economic challenges.

I have tried to make a very simple point here today.  Those who succeed in the 
future must build technology that empowers the individual, and doesn't just 
power the hardware.  This is the psychological challenge that we in the 
industry face. When technology is designed from the start to address the 
organizational, cultural, and economic challenges that users face, we will have 
met the challenge.  This is the road Digital has chosen to take.

Two years ago, in a forum not unlike this one, Ken Olsen said that Digital is 
a software company.  That statement was met with a bit of perplexity at the 
time.  Recall your own reaction.  He was telling the world Digital was 
committing itself to making sure that computers are useful, that empower 
individuals, and don't simply power themselves up for their own sake.  This 
is not an easy lesson for us to learn.

And to others in the industry it will be harder.

The video we saw today reminded us that futurists can make some very strange 
predictions.  But there is another kind of futurist. A futurist of the past - 
an archeologist.  In the year 2100, when archeologists examine old dumping 
grounds to sift through the rubble of failed civilizations, we can't predict 
what they are going to find, though my suspicion is it will be "hot boxes," 
lots and lots  of unopened "hot boxes," maybe even 10,000 MIPS strong.  What we
can predict, however, is the methods that these architects of a successful
civilization will use.  First, they'll still be using those little brushes. 
And second, the tools they use to empower them on the job will be
archeologists' workbenches.

Thank you.