serendipityoucity

Forbes & verisign have a corporate thrust called intelligent infrastructure defined as

the intersection of the Internet, telecommunications and information technology

I just finished reading their paper, which was very much a corporate marketing piece but I did find some very interesting concepts.  Intelligent infrastructures are an intelligent layer added onto existing infrastructures once they have reached a certain level of complexity and usage in their development trajectories. This intelligent layer improves coordination and communication and mitigates complexity.  Once the intelligent infrastructure is deployed the initial infrastructure accelerates. The example provided is the advent of the telegraph which inevitably improved and accelerated the development of the rail system.  The signaling system 7 (SS7) and the domain name system (DNS) are also considered to be intelligent infrastructure examples.  The authors further suggest that intelligent infrastructures make the complexity of any given infrastructure invisible to their users.

The intelligent infrastructures has 6 critical elements:

interoperability, scalability, adaptability, reliability, visibility and security.

Infrastructure convergence such as in the case of the electrical, transport and communication infrastructures resulted in growth for each during their development and in the US according to this paper, Real GDP per capita almost doubled as these were all being constructed & used concurrently.

Predecessor Infrastructure is also an interesting concept, in this paper a graph shows labour productivity growth increasing with the advent/growth of the following infrastructures - rail, electrification, interstate highway, jet age & computing, and the digital infrastructure.

The authors suggest that wireless technology and associated telecom de-regulation will require an intelligent infrastructure to reduce their complexity as will finding interoperability solutions between public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet.

They also argue that the intelligent infrastructure for the digital infrastructure will be very large, capital intensive and highly dependant on specialized knowledge thus a central provider is required - in essence classic monopolistic & technocratic arguments often associated with infrastructures.

The paper ends with the technological challenge of finding the intelligent infrastructure for the current digital infrastructure (they did not define this)!

Hmm! none of these concepts are in wikipedia! So they could simply be this corporations jargon.  I will need to dig a bit more.  For the time being, i like some of the ideas and wonder if they are true!