whle a bit old, it is still interesting to note the vitality of the new information infrastructure

[David Farber <farber () linc cis upenn edu>]

that the government will need to provide resources for both basic 
and
applied research as well as providing financial assistance to 
those
who provide education and training.
     
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
     Organizational learning closely parallels user acceptance
and training. Many applications will involve the development of
new paradigms for doing the job and will require re-engineering
the business or mission (electronic commerce and telecommuting,
or K-12 education, for example.)
     New ways of functioning, distinctly different from current
practices, will be required to achieve the greatest benefits from
NII applications in many areas. These new ways -- for what
constitutes the "classroom" in education, what goes on in it, and
what is the role of the teacher; for what constitutes the
workplace; and for the conduct of commerce -- will require a
large degree of organizational learning. This learning will not
always be easy to achieve: it will result in new roles and
missions for many people; it will require retraining of
individuals, some with professional and career skills learned
over a lifetime, so that they will be more able make the
transition to the workplaces of the Information Age.
     
PRIVATE-SECTOR  ACCEPTANCE
OF GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY
     Private-sector acceptance by service providers and vendors
of the results of government-sponsored research is an important
issue if the nation is to reap the benefits of the government's
investment in new NII applications and services. Much of the NII
technology that initially will be developed as part of 
government-
sponsored programs could later be adopted by the private sector
if the needs of the private sector are properly integrated in the
development stage. The success of a new applications generally
requires substantial user involvement in planning, decision-
making and development. In developing new technologies and
accelerating the implementation of NII applications, the
government must work closely with those who will eventually
provide and vend NII applications to ensure compatibility,
interoperability, and usability. This is especially true in
health care, environmental monitoring, manufacturing, and
electronic commerce and telecommuting, where the federal

government is promoting applications which will be offered
primarily by the private sector.
     
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
     Intellectual property rights is an important issue in those
areas where individual intellectual creations (books, music,
software) are accessible - and subject to copying - by many
people via the NII. Libraries are the most obvious area where
this is a concern, but other application areas such as education
and government services also are involved. Ensuring that the
creators of this material can be compensated for their work while
still providing for public "fair use" under the proper
circumstances will be a key determinant of the quality and
availability of informational goods and materials through the
NII.
     
INFORMATION SECURITY
     Information security - which includes confidentiality,
information integrity, and information authenticity4 - is an
important issue in all of the applications areas considered here,
in view of the many potential threats posed to the security of
inter-linked information systems by malicious pranksters or
criminals skilled in computer use.  For example, it will be
important in the health care area that individual medical records
are not stolen or surreptitiously modified via the NII; it will
be important in the manufacturing, electronic commerce, and
telecommuting areas that proprietary information belonging to
individual companies is adequately protected; and it will be
important for environmental monitoring so that severe weather
warnings and toxic release alerts are not compromised.
     
INFORMATION ACCESS,
STORAGE, AND RETRIEVAL
     Flexible and timely access to all of the information 
resources
contained in the NII - the knowledge of what information is 
available,
where it is, and how to get it in a timely fashion and in a 
useful
form - is important. This access requires that the information 
not
only be available, but it must also be maintained and kept 
current.
Access to timely, useful information is especially important in
applications areas such as manufacturing, libraries, and 
environmental
monitoring, where large quantities of data must be sorted, 
stored,
retrieved, and managed.
     
INFORMATION AND DATA STANDARDS
     The development and implementation of standards for
information and data are essential to ensuring that information
passed from one point to another along the NII is complete,

unambiguous, and, most importantly, usable.5  While data
standards are critical, the technical connectivity they enable is
not enough. Without information standards, companies cannot
exchange information in a useful manner. This is true at both the
national and international level. One of the major challenges in
this area is developing ways to define these standards so the
same data can be used throughout the life cycle of the product,
from design through retirement/recycling.
     
CONVERSION OF INFORMATION
     Conversion of information from "old" storage media (books,
drawings, and pictures, for example) to NII electronic storage
media will be an important issue in all applications areas
possessing a large legacy of pre-NII information. This area
includes libraries (everything that has been written since the
dawn of recorded history), health care (the existing medical
records of patients), and government services (patents, for
example). It may include other applications areas as well,
although the importance of conversion fades as information ages
in many areas, in distinct contrast to the situation in
libraries.
     
USER-FRIENDLY HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
     User-friendly hardware and software always have been 
important
for mass applications of information technology. For NII 
applications,
such as those in health care or education, that are meant for use 
by
broad segments of society user-friendliness will be an important
factor in user acceptance. But the impact of user-friendly 
systems
goes beyond simple convenience and marketing to serious questions 
of
accuracy and reliability. User-hostile systems encourage mistakes 
in
using applications, and errors in the information handled by the
system.
     
INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDS
     Interoperability standards are designed to ensure that
information can be transferred between different networks, or
different hardware and software systems, with accuracy,
reliability and security - the system side of the information
standards issue discussed above. Interoperability standards are
important to virtually all NII applications, and critically
important to those that must function across a range of disparate
systems, in manufacturing, health care and education, for
example.
     There are many unresolved questions regarding
interoperability standards, such as the best mechanism for
developing good standards that will be widely accepted by NII
users and vendors. In some areas, such as manufacturing, it is
important that new standards be compatible with the large

existing base of installed systems and archived data. As with all
standards-related issues, it will be important to develop
standards that are flexible enough to adapt to future changes in
technology and permit systems to upgrade at an affordable cost.
     
SCALABILITY
     Scalability will be an issue in all NII applications that
are developed initially as small pilot projects, later to be
extended to widespread use. For example, in education,
demonstrations of attractive technology applications have
required highly skilled people, dedicated projects, and special
funding. Scaling from a few demonstration schools to every school
will require the application to perform as well with dramatically
lower resources of skills and funding. Successful scale-up
requires substantial user involvement in planning, decision-
making and development of both the full scale systems and the
pilot and demonstration forerunners. Similar problems face all
seven of the applications areas considered here, but scaling will
be particularly challenging for wide-spread application areas
such as education, libraries, health care and manufacturing.
     
COST AND PRICING
     Cost and pricing - how much a new application costs, how
much the user is charged for the service, and who pays any
difference between cost and price - will be key issues in nearly
all NII applications areas.
     Like information products and services generally, most NII
applications will have high initial development costs and low
replication or usage costs. As a result, it can be economically
efficient as well as socially beneficial to maintain low prices
for applications to stimulate their use, so long as the operating
costs for each new user are recovered. However this approach can
result in prices that differ from the real costs and applications
developers - both public and private - must recover their initial
costs as well as the costs of serving users through some
combination of higher prices or subsidies.
     
PUBLIC FUNDING
     Closely related to costs and pricing issues are questions of
how public funding should be used for the development and
deployment of new applications. In some application areas, such
as education, relatively large amounts of government assistance
probably will be required to implement NII applications
equitably, since funding to acquire new technology is limited in
most school systems.
     Just as potential NII applications exist in virtually every
department of government, so calls for taxpayer assistance in the
implementation of those applications will come from every quarter
and constituency. How the limited Federal and state resources
will be allocated - indeed, how those decisions will be made -
are crucial questions for every level of government.
     
                                
                                

                                
                                
                                
            CRITICAL ISSUES IN KEY APPLICATION AREAS
                                
                                
                                
                                
     
     The issues discussed above are all important to the success
of NII activities developing and deploying applications in the
application areas identified. In some of these areas, certain of
the issues are critical. (These are identified by the  in the
table on page 6.)  These critical issues, if not handled
properly, could prevent successful development and deployment of
the NII activities in question.
     These critical issue/applications area combinations include:
     
PRIVACY IN HEALTH CARE
     Privacy of personal data will be absolutely essential in
health-care applications, a task complicated by the fact that
many different parties - insurance companies and medical
researchers, for example - will need automated access to at least
some portions of individual patient data. The privacy of that
data must be assured, and threats to that privacy exist today. In
the automated health care information system envisaged in the
Administration's proposed health care reform proposal and in the
NII, the opportunities for violations of this privacy may be
vastly increased.
     
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
IN COMMERCE AND EDUCATION
     In the early days of the development of the telephone, some
observers noted that the new invention was so clearly useful that
in the future every city would need to have one to bring news
quickly to the citizenry. What they did not recognize was that
the telephone brought with it a fundamental change in
communication. Old, highly centralized systems and institutions
developed to handle the post and telegraphy weren't appropriate
for the new invention and couldn't use it to the best advantage.
     The NII brings with it a fundamental change in how
information moves and is handled. In the application areas of
education and commerce in particular, this change will require
new ways of functioning - distinctly different from current
practices - to achieve the greatest benefits from the NII.
     Restructuring systems and organizations to take maximum
advantage of NII applications without impairing the effectiveness
of the organization as a whole will require a large degree of
learning and adaptation on the part of the institution. New ways
of doing the job will be markedly different from past practices
and may require significant investments in professional
development and training because individuals (teachers for
example) play key roles in these applications areas.
     

INFORMATION AND DATA STANDARDS
IN MANUFACTURING
     Manufacturing is driven by the need to produce high-quality,
competitively priced goods, tailored to customers' needs,
quickly. This cannot occur without the ability to exchange
manufacturing information and data across activities inside and
outside an organization in a timely and useful manner. Moreover,
such advanced manufacturing applications as concurrent
engineering and agile manufacturing cannot take place without the
development and implementation of standards for the exchange of
manufacturing information and data.
     Already, US manufacturers and the federal government have
begun the process to jointly create a standard for the exchange
of product model information (STEP). Such a standard will give
small and large manufacturers the ability to expand and integrate
their operations and enable the introduction of advanced
manufacturing applications such as concurrent engineering and
agile manufacturing into the American workplace.
     Additionally, for the NII to be a reality, communications
data standards for interoperability must be established.
Significant progress has been made in this area through efforts
such as Open Systems Architecture (OSA) and the Integrated
Services Digital Network (IDSN). As NII applications and
technologies advance, the development, design, and implementation
of interoperability standards will need to keep pace. This need
is particularly acute in manufacturing and electronic commerce.
     
CONVERSION OF INFORMATION
IN LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES
     The bulk of the material in our nation's libraries (e.g.,
100 million items in the Library of Congress) is not in digital
form. Without conversion of at least selected parts of these
collections, they will never be accessible over the NII. Although
the technologies for producing these conversions are in many
cases available and constantly improving, the costs are not
trivial and so the sources of funding for the digitization of 
non-
commercial, non-entertainment materials and which materials
should receive priority are open issues.6


                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
               WORK-IN-PROGRESS: IMPORTANT ISSUES
                  ALREADY ADDRESSED BY THE IITF
     
     The IITF already has noted and organized itself to address
several of the important issues on our list. In particular, the
Committee on Applications and Technology has formed a Technology
Policy Working Group to address the issues of interoperability
and scalability, and working groups have been formed as part of
the Information Policy Committee and the Telecommunications

Policy Committee to address intellectual property rights,
privacy, and universal access.
     
     We strongly endorse these efforts. The balance of the issues
present in this review include questions which cut across all
areas of applications development, technology policy, information
policy and telecommunications policy. We look forward to working
with the  Information Policy Committee and the Telecommunications
Policy Committee to further explore and refine these issues.
     
     
                  NEXT STEPS AND FOLLOW THROUGH
     
     For the IITF to follow through on the remainder of the
issues identified in this paper requires at least two steps.
     First, the IITF committees and interested individuals and
groups from the private sector should review this paper and the
issues we have presented to broaden our understanding and
perspective. We welcome comments.
     Next, the IITF should review the issues reported here, the
framework for assessing the issues, and the comments from the
private sector and the other committees to decide if its
organization is adequately structured to address the key issues.
For example, if the categorization of issues outlined here -
according to the components of the infrastructure:  people,
information, processes (software, especially applications),
hardware and networks - is useful, we should consider whether our
current IITF structure covering information, telecommunications,
and applications and technology adequately addresses people and
hardware.
     Some steps are already being taken in this direction. A
working group of the Committee on Applications and Technology has
been formed to address technology policy issues, and the
Committee has instituted a public issues discussion program as
part of its regular meetings to facilitate a dialog on the issues
outlined in this paper.
     In closing, we would like to repeat and emphasize the point
made earlier. In presenting this issues paper, the Committee on
Applications and Technology intends only to describe an initial
catalog of critical issues that must be addressed and resolved in
the development of the NII. We see this is a starting point for
discussion, and not a document to close off discussion of other
issues.
     Your comments on this paper can be sent to any of the
following addresses:
     
     Post:     Committee on Applications and Technology
          National Institute of Standards and Technology
          Building 101, Room A1000
          Gaithersburg, MD 20899
     Phone:    (301) 975-2667
     FAX:      (301) 216-0529
     E-Mail: cat_exec () nist gov
     

                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                          BIBLIOGRAPHY
                                
                                
                                
                                
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      Baer, Walter S., Government Investment in
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      Hundley, Richard O., Robert H. Anderson, Anthony C. Hearn,
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      Scully, John, et. al., Perspectives on the National
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_______________________________
     1    The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for
Action, Information Infrastructure Task Force, Washington, D.C.,
September 15, 1993.
     2Speech to the National Press Club, December 21, 1993.
     3 Privacy deals with an assurance that no parties authorized
access to the information make improper use of it.
     4 Confidentiality of information is the assurance that no
unauthorized parties have had improper access to the information.
Information integrity is the assurance that the content of the
information has not been altered.  Information authenticity is
the assurance that the authorship or source of the information is
as indicated.
     5 For the purposes of this paper information standards could
be thought of as addressing the question "what information do you
need?" while data standards address the question "what form
should you expect the information in?"
     6 In the 15th century, after Gutenberg's invention of
moveable type for printing, mankind faced a similar problem:
converting the hand-lettered manuscripts in the libraries of that
age to the printed page.  At the time, this may have seemed like
a major undertaking.  Looking back at it today, when the volume
of existing printed information - and the capacity for producing
printed information - exceeds by many orders of magnitude the
volume of hand-letter manuscripts that existed in 1440, it seems
like a minor problem.  Future ages, in which the volume of
digital, multimedia information in library collections exceeds by
many orders of magnitude the volume of current printed
collections, may have a similar view of today's problem.