Resurrecting the NewRuleSets.Project for real (in Manhattan!)
Dateline: Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Washington DC, 7 September 2005
The upcoming conference in Manhattan (Enterprise Resilience Management for the Financial Sector) that Enterra is putting on with the Association for Enterprise Integration is, in many ways, an attempt to restart the sort of Wall Street-Pentagon dialogue on the military-market nexus that I had pursued with Cantor Fitzgerald back before 9/11. The defense community is pushing this dialogue through AFEI, a defense industry association, because it senses the need to build up a lot more understanding between itself and the money guys. My guess is that defense people are hoping to learn what they can from the dialogue, feeling that the financial services sector can teach them a thing or two about how the GIG ("global information grid" that will run future high-tech warfare ops while resting-precariously-atop commercial backbone otherwise known as the Internet) can be made more resilient with time.
I think defense people are correct in this assumption. I saw how far ahead Wall Street was in understanding Y2K years ago, viewing it as both a danger and a new and unprecedented opportunity to get its shit together and make itself not just resilient but more competitive in the global marketplace in the process. After 9/11 and a few years of the Global War on Terrorism, I think the Pentagon is beginning to see the rise of the GIG as not just something to defend, secure, and harden, but rather a key domain through which to raise the U.S. military's competitive stature in both war (Leviathan) and peace (SysAdmin). More than that, determining who logs onto this GIG (or "SkyNet" or "Matrix" or whatever other movie reference you care to name) and under what conditions and what they access and so on will be precedent-setting far and beyond the domains of conflict and post-conflict recovery. It's likely to set the standards, in many ways, for systemic responses to disasters like Katrina. It's likely to set standards for how governments share information and how citizens access government networks-for encryption in general. In short, it's likely to set the gold standard for a lot of venues.
DoD has set these standards before: for the interstate highways (okay, we borrowed those from the German autobahn), for satellites, for the Internet, for GPS, for UAVs, and so on and so forth. So influencing these debates is a must for those who want connectivity to future definitions of war and peace.
I'm very excited about the conference and I encourage like-minded thinkers and players (we all think but not all of us play-me, I've avoided it my entire career!) to sign up. It ain't cheap, but it isn't a moneymaker for Enterra, just our effort to push the dialogue along with the help of AFEI. The network itself is the function here. People are always asking me for heads up for opportunities like this and here is one. Not just face time but serious head time with a lot of big minds doing important work. Stuff like this, I honestly believe, is about making history in real-time.
We build the SysAdmin one node at a time. Come help us build some more connectivity in Manhattan on the 19th. I promise a real education, which, quite frankly, is how I get talked into these things myself!
Here's the daily catch:
■ Katrina: cue up the happy stories, cue up the celebrities■ Katrina's lessons learned include the usual calls for better blended SysAdmin force
■ Egypt's election is one small step for Mubarek, no giant leap for Egyptians