Solutions for the Dancing CIO

But the modern startup culture is working quickly, and many initiatives are afoot (see "From Reliable to Convenient," this page) to automate or simplify these problems. Solutions are already being installed. Recently, Saddle Creek, a logistics provider with warehouses around the country, networked all its bar-code readers (handheld, truck-mounted and wearable), enabling any manager anywhere in the enterprise to monitor the status of the equipment. The company uses technology from Wavelink to monitor device and network performance, download and install patches and upgrades, and control security definitions. Kathy Fulton, manager of technical services at Saddle Creek, calls this "distance management." "The need for onsite technical support has been taken out of the equation," she says.

The New World of CIO Politics

Beyond this mountain, however, lies another. The essence of device networking is moving static, single-constituency data feeds and control loops across borders, vocabularies and cultures, both inside the enterprise and up and down the value chain. Changes like these pose problems of recruitment, education and trust. These problems are political, not technical.

Earlier in this decade the Iowa Department of Transportation (IDOT) encountered these issues when it decided to renovate Interstate 235, the freeway running through the center of Des Moines. Highways have been enthusiastic users of IT since the ’60s, when roadbed traffic sensors started to control traffic lights. By the 1970s, highway construction projects routinely incorporated full-fledged star networks, with communications running back and forth between a control core and an ever-expanding list of peripheral devices, including dynamic signage, cameras, weather sensors and electronic toll collection.

All this experience has made highway engineers early adopters in the device networking revolution. Thus IDOT decided to make I-235’s new intelligent transportation system (ITS) into a data-sharing platform that would accommodate the full range of devices and users, both current and potential. In this system, emergency vehicle call centers anywhere would be able to route responding units through the lowest traffic densities using images from surveillance cameras as guides. Citizens, even in other cities, would be able to consult the output of traffic-mapping algorithms. Interfaces would be open and standardized, so new applications could be snapped into place.

IDOT representatives began visiting the potential user groups, explaining the new system and its possibilities. Often they ran into education issues. One 911 center, for instance, said that while the system looked nice, the center was too busy to take on responsibility for managing another data input. The IDOT team members asked if they could come to watch operations. At one point, an IDOT rep noticed that the call handlers routinely ran searches in the data banks of the county assessor’s offices to find photos of the property at the origin address of a call (to be able to tell responding units about building entrances). Michael Jackson, special projects engineer and manager of the project, jumped on the analogy, arguing that IDOT’s system was just like that, only with a traffic situation instead of a building. The center thought it over and today is a happy user of the technology. "You have to get your feet in the door," Jackson says. "Without putting a guy in there to watch how they did business, we would have had no way of doing that." (You can admire the final result at www.i235.com.)