Academic Reflection

This is a personal reflection over what can be improved in our scenarios. By re-thinking over the imperfections, there is a possibility of future improvement.

There are scenarios, but what about the strategy?

We’ve made the three scenarios depicting the future of grid computing development, and so what? Something seems to be missing. The scenarios we made are technology focused. Suitable business strategies that might work in all scenarios aren’t clearly pointed out. This is on the one hand because, we are over focused on technology; one the other hand, we weren’t associating grid computing with any industry or business at the very start of our work. We simply aimed at finding the possible future of grid computing itself. If the business strategy is introduced during our scenario making process, I’m sure the final story would make a difference.

The B2C commercial market opportunities?

At the end of our presentation, Professor Erasmus suggested us a further think in Grid’s consumer applications. Actually we’ve heard about and discussed a lot of potential grid B2C business applications which are mostly using information grid. Strange enough, we omitted the information grid and jumped our focus to computational grid which led us to almost another world. How did this happen?
I traced back to our scenario developing process. There were some pitfalls that we didn’t pay attention to:

1. We focused on what were not available, what were the difficulties and challenges, yet omitted what were actually available but not fully exploited. By digging into all the challenges and problems and narrowing them down to focus on “the most important”, we simply missed out the other side of the coin: being creative, it means both inventing something new and using something old in a new way! We fall into the pitfall of not seeing the other side.With information grid technology available, it is far from being a utility. There is huge market potential！
2. Is the most important enough?
   • By focusing on “the most important”, we can get the trend right. But then? As most driving forces are inter-related, it’s hard to identify one or two that are most important yet not loosing sight of the little tinny forces that together with others would turn out to make the whole world different.
     
   • We tried, but didn’t see any strong forces that could drive B2C market's demand. Information sharing? Well, there is web and internet, why bother?… Computing power utility? An individual user would hardly need that, it is for large institutions… Savings on hard disk? No, hard disk is becoming too cheap to out compete the importance of privacy… What if mobility become so big that people simply want to share/access information without burden of hard disk? What if the government regulation becomes so strong and law so mature that privacy won’t be an issue any more? What if commercial companies create needs for customers? What if the definition of Grid is wider than today and is an “all-including” concept too common to all? All of these need out of box thinking beyond what is “most important”, and should be constantly adjusted through the learning process. Moreover, mechanisms such as summary tables should be used to help facilitate systematically study of the systems diagram without loosing sight of “blind spots”.
     

Grid Re-definition?

Through our research, we’ve already known that the “GRID” concept has been evolving since its birth, and is becoming wilder and wilder as an aggregation/ evolutional concept of all the related technologies. But we never really see beyond the fact and question ourselves: would the current definition evolve in the future? In what trend would the new definition be heading?

Conclusions

If time allows, I believe our scenarios can be further improved. Even with these imperfections, I still cherish the effort the whole group made, and I've learned a lot from it!

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