Information Highway Infrastructure is Critical
[This appeared in the Cleveland magazine Crain’s Cleveland Business, January 30, 1995]
Business strategists who met recently in Cleveland to focus on central and Eastern Europe are facing the convergence of information processing, media, and telecommunications.
New infrastructure (generally referred to as the information superhighway) will help them develop technologies, such as cellular telephones, fax, and data transmission, to build a global networks of business contacts.
To build that infrastructure, planners see that partnerships are needed: corporate joint ventures and public/private sector links. A prominent example is the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program.
This federal program, approved by Congress, recently channeled $24 million into projects in 44 states. Next year, these "seed money" grants will increase to $67 million.
Each applicant raises matching funds from other sources, including corporate partners. The Commerce Department estimate is that its seed money will attract $1.3 billion worth of such private/public partnerships.
Two projects in Ohio have received more than $800,000, and provided almost $1 million in their own matching funds. One of the projects, the National Public Telecomputing Network, based in Solon, has helped rural communities develop low-cost computer networks and provides cybercasting for them. Local libraries often play a key development role in the networks.
With the help of the federal matching funds, the network has gotten 46 local systems up and running; another 30 will be online this year. The network's mix of funds includes the federal grant, along with grants from Ameritech Corp. and Apple Computer Co.
Another Ohio project, at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, will provide access to health information for citizens of the Ohio Valley.
Along with the new technology, Ameritech Corp. has bought a fiber optic installation system from the Elyria-based Arnco Corporation to expand the telephone company's network in its five-state region.
Arnco's system is the first designed in the United States that is capable of high speed, safe installation of fiber optic cable in the web of underground conduit and duct systems, said Robert Smith, president of Arnco.
Mr. Smith said the system uses an air-assisted, push-and-pull installation method that can double the installation speed of traditional cable pulling methods.
Adviser worker training is needed to get such networks to operate efficiently.
Nearly two-thirds of the workers who will be in the labor force in the year 2005 already are on the job. To maintain efficiencies and productivity, most of these companies (and workers) will need two things: training and travel along the information infrastructure to get that training.
Motorola is considered the training superstar. It calculates that every $1 spent on training delivers more than $30 in productivity gains within a three-year period. Increasingly, training programs take place on interactive devices that connect people at distant sites.
This data travel will be done on information superhighways. Stanford University has been delivering instruction to engineers where they work for more than a decade.
Academic and business partnerships make sense in the training arena, but they grow slowly, so many firms develop their own programs.
Two interesting facts: AT&T has spent more on employee education than the entire budget of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fed Ex drivers have shown how important technology is in tracking our parcels as they travel to their destinations. These workers are themselves re-trained constantly using technology interconnects.
Northeast Ohio's business landscape (including the training level of the workers here) will be a clear beneficiary of new information infrastructures.