Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Lightweight Infrastructure vs. Mega-Infrastructure
This week's The Economist has a fantastic survey of logistics. It is a great survey of the explosive growth of outsourcing of logistics in many industries, but also the growing risks to business of trimming too much fat out of their supply chain.
My favorite quote, describing the computational requirements of UPS's 300,000 package per hour sorting operation at its Louisville, Kentucky hub:"More data are processed here every 30 minutes than in an entire day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange."
As someone who has actually seen the IT backend of the NYSE I'm amazed at what this might mean. (I visited there while researching the need for redundant fiber links into critical facilities in Lower Manhattan for the City of New York).
The article made me realize though the irony of where I'm at intellectually right now. We're currently engaged by UPS, creating a custom version of our 2006 Map of the Decade. So I'm finding myself simultaneously thinking about both lightweight infrastructure as part of our overall Technology Horizons work, but also what are one of the world's largest and fastest growing mega-infrastructures - UPS and FedEx's logistics networks. The Economist cleverly and accurately dub them "the physical internet".
Alex and I had a brief side conversation during the recent Tech Horizons Exchange that maybe instead of trying to reconcile this conflict - how could we possibly argue for a future of lightweight infrastructure in a world of Three River Gorge Dams, UPSs and SuperPanaMax container ships? Global logistics is one of the few kinds of infrastructures to which I have a very hard time conceiving a possible lightweight alternative that isn't hopelessly redundant, inefficient, and insecure.
Maybe next year we'll turn to mega-infrastuctures as a research theme? They are both valid, countervailing trends, spurring globalization and addressing its impacts at various scales. In addition to in-depth looks at each though, we need to build a framework that links them together and maps the ways that are in opposition, and interconnected and working together.
What do you guys think?