Disruptive Technologies

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christiansen popularized the term “disruptive technologies” from his research into why companies fail based on technological innovation that makes their products less viable. His most famous example is the death of the mini-computer companies (DEC, Data General, etc.) upon the introduction of the PC. The wave of PC introductions were missed by the established mini-computer companies and their business model was disrupted by this innovation. Christiansen argues that major companies are often in effect blindsided by new technologies that initially appeal to lower-end customers who seek less costly versions of a product, and the ability to embrace these technologies leads to company failures.

Ephraim Schwartz, writing in InfoWorld about defining disruption, broadens the notion of disruptive technologies to cover those technologies that bring change. In most instances, what makes a technology disruptive is that it brings radical change by introducing a new way of doing things generally at a much lower cost than before, and when the technologies go mainstream, the way we do business changes. Disruptive technologies are often the cause of changes in industry leadership, as new and more flexible companies emerge to take advantage of these technologies because they are not tied to sustained past offerings, or major companies re-invent themselves to develop whole new business models.

If you extend this concept to what it might mean in the public safety and justice information technology world, it is very important to identify and evaluate those newly invented technologies that may lead to a new way of doing business, perhaps at much less cost, and often with cultural perturbations. Along the way, disruptive technologies will change the landscape of the companies who participate in the justice information technology world, as either new start-ups offer amazing new technology or established companies find ways to integrate these breakthroughs into their business model. From the practitioner’s point of view, the advent of disruptive technologies can offer a variety of impacts that will attract attention, such as drastic cost reduction, or major new capability that will lead to a paradigm shift. Either way, these technologies will affect budgets, operations, management and staff skill requirements, so they may not be ignored by any serious manager, technologist, or leader in justice information technology.

So what are the disruptive technologies that should be studied by both industry and practitioner participants in the justice information technology field? Can we identify a reasonable list that is worthy of study, contemplation, and experimentation or even adoption? In starting off 2003, InfoWorld created a special issue on the topic of disruptive technologies and proposed some candidates as filling the bill. This list is a moving target, as technologies get widely implemented and therefore become sustaining rather than disruptive, but the following technologies are of particular relevance to the public safety and justice information technology world:

Web Services
	The use of XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and the related layers that can provide ways to loosely couple information systems and save considerable cost in creating virtual enterprise information systems
Broadband Wireless
	The capability to connect remote computing devices to a network using relatively high speed connections such that the remote user experiences connectivity that is not much different from LAN speeds.
Collaboration Software
	The ability to interact in real-time or near-real-time on joint projects, discuss topics of mutual interest, contribute to a common outcome (product), gain input from diverse users. Examples include Instant Messaging, blogging, e-zones for collaboration, new versions of Microsoft Office
Voice and Data Convergence
	The coming together of telephone, radio voice transmission and data transmission so that TCP/IP is the protocol supporting both voice and data, and devices share functions. One of the most interesting convergence examples is the software defined radio.
Nanotechnology
	The development of molecular constructs of materials and fabrication of extremely small devices such as memory that reduce the size of computers and memory to 100 times smaller than today’s technology.
Federated Systems
	The use of Metadata to construct an enterprise view of multiple heterogeneous information sources so as to permit the structured exchange of information between legacy systems