I have a dream and hope

“I have a dream” was said by Martin Luther King, Jr in in his memorable speech 1963. He listed many very encouraged and humane dreams, which has get real – at least partly.

I have been looking Information and Communication Technology (ICT) some 20 years through different windows (and those windows are not any Seattle based ICT giant’s trademarks). A lot has happened during that time both from consumer and company ICT point of view. Definitely I wouldn´t like to go back to old times, because there are a lot of huge steps happened.

Networks capacity has expanded a lot and nowadays you can use very large set of IT application from your home or everywhere where connected. Data processing is quite seldom a bottleneck anymore and response times are in (at least in theory) very rapid, normally few seconds or even some parts of a second only. ICT is already got to almost everywhere. My car is full of IT, I open door to our office corridor with electric key, my home´s heating and ventilation work with help of microprocessors and I can order and watch a film on TV without picking any DVD or VHS tape from video rentals. Great, isn´t that but I have quite odd feeling that ICT might have taken a mastering role in our life and gradually, when working these 20 years with ICT, I have become a dreamer.

I have a dream, that on one beautiful day I could access in one minute to operator call center specialist without waiting on-line over 20 minutes when having troubles with my mobile phone connection or wide-band network connectivity. And on top of that I could get answer to my question right away without pushing forward my question to second or third party.

I have a dream, that I could get undisturbed phone conversations back. My phone is full of all type of professional or non-professional applications but latest today I needed to make continuously new calls with one of our Avance MBA student (who happens to be highly professional IT director as well), because our calls were breaking all the time. Maybe the reason was that my colleague was in car. Obviously the present mobile phones are not targeted to be used in moving car. They seems to be for use in place where wireless network (WLAN) offers strong enough capacity to surf in internet and load large amount of data for fun.

I have a dream that organizations like VR (state railways) would test their system and integrations thoroughly that I could buy fluently ticket to train in few minutes and not get experiences like few weeks ago, when I could not buy train ticket on my travel back to home from Helsinki to Jyväskylä.

I have a dream that Finnish public sector could finally consolidate and unify their thousands of different IT systems, databases and infrastructures. Through that way would not get only our taxes lowered but people could go to whatever hospital or children to kindergarten without need to go through all the bureaucracy and personal information telling again and again. Simultaneously there would be a consolidated data center, a place which could offer home for all of the commonly agreed applications for Finnish municipals and save efforts and energy and money for more reasonable purposes.

I am dreaming also, that my kids could keep touch with very real and concrete things, like nature, fishing and sports instead of diving totally to virtual world. I understand that PC games, social media and amusements in internet are fancy and nice but according to my values those are not real things.

Our life has changed and will do that in the future. We need to educate ourselves and understand how Information and Communication technology can help us enabling present and new things. Simultaneously we need to manage and structure ICT to avoid that IT does not take master position instead of servant.

But I´m not only dreaming - I´m also hopeful. My son Iiro (13 years old) spent one school day for his work life familiarization in our Avance office a few weeks ago. As one task we asked him to describe what kind of words describes as the best the future leader. His answer was the following;

“In ten years forward an Avance MBA graduated leader is hardworking, honest, trusted, business conscious, moderate and quick-witted.

Definition for good future leader includes no words about technology freak or geek, virtualized, clock speeded, cloudy, integrity or latency directed. Therefore I think we have a good reason to trust that our growing generation is finally wise enough to focus on real life things and keep ICT in servant position instead of letting IT to master people´s life.

And that way I feel my dreams would get real – at least partly.

Harri Hyvönen

Programmes Manager