New Metrics needed for the Smart Economy 07-055

Are the metrics we used for GDP adequate to convey what's going on in the new Smart Economy?  I don't believe so.

How is the Smart Economy growing?

Here are some new metrics that we could explore: Servers, emails, IT Brains, Information Stress

Power usage by computer servers

• Servers in the United States and their attendant cooling systems consumed 45 million kilowatt-hours of energy in 2005 (more then what 20 US states use combined)
• Over a five-year period from 2000 to 2005 in the USA, there has been about a doubling of server power consumption. 
• The world's server power consumption in 2005 was estimated at 123 million kilowatt-hours
• Based on the number of servers IDC forecasts to ship, the world's server power consumption will increase another 40 percent over 2005 levels by 2010, assuming per-server power consumption stays at 2005 levels But if server power consumption grows at past rates, 2010 power consumption will be about 75 percent greater than 2005 levels,

Emails

• By some estimates, more than 100 billion emails are sent daily by approximately 1.1 billion users...(and some days I feel like I'm on the receiving end of most of them !!!)

IT Brains

• Which country has the most IT brains?  USA is #1, followed by India, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, UK, Canada, and Belarus. Just shows that some new players are quickly coming on the scene

Information Overload

• Hard facts on the extent of information overload, a term coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock, are hard to come by, but one of the most quoted international studies, Dying for Information, found that, in 1997, more than half of Australian managers were unable to deal effectively with the information they had to process.
• According to a recent IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will double every 11 hours !!

• Peter Jenkins on his blog, jumps on that estimate and looks at the consequences of that doubling curve:

  "This means that it would double an astounding 796 times in 1 year. According to my calculations, we would never reach the end of the year. Conservatively assuming that we start in 2010 with a total amount of digital information equal to about 100 exabytes, then about 110 days into the year, (April 20, 2010), we would reach the maximum computational storage capacity of the entire universe which is 10⁹² according to Seth Lloyd (unless large scale quantum computing is operationalized by that time)."

..wish my bank account would grow half as fast !!!

Source: The Smart Economy Workshop on: Latest Tools for Advanced Environmental Scanning, Managing Information Overload and Sense-making

How will you cope in this new Smart World?

Are your corporate scanning and sense-making capabilities robust enough to keep up?

Do you even have scanning capabilities?

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Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

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"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

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Comments

[Peter s Jenkins]

Hi Walter - the link to the IBM study seems to be broken - could you provide a working link to it please? That would be very helpful.

Thanks!