Barack Obama and rebuilding the digital infrastructure

The inauguration of Barack Obama will easily be the most twittered, blogged, YouTubed, streamed and Facebooked Presidential swearing in that has ever taken place. That is an easy call as some of those technologies were in their infancy or not around four or eight years ago. While those consumer tech services will play a big part on day one, which business technologies  will get a boost in the next four years?

Let's take five of the priorities established by the President-elect and soon to be President and see how they play out for tech.

1. Security. While reviving a flattened economy gets portrayed as the primary task at hand, security has a way of forcing its name to the top of the agenda. Securing the nation's data infrastructure will become as important as securing the nation's physical infrastructure. Look for data security, encryption on the fly and identity protection to become major priorities.

2. Bridges and roads. I'm talking about the digital infrastructure here. While we are all busy emailing, sending videos around and getting ready to watch television on the web, the infrastructure that supports all this activity remains invisible and underfunded. No one really knows what will happen if everyone decides to jump on the web to watch the inauguration. I'm guessing that web performance would quickly downgrade and eventually go dark. The continued rise of broadband communications requires a lot more than lighting up dark fiber. Major access points, data switches and automated bandwidth allocation require not just planning, but investment.

3. A Green initiative. If the new administration is looking for energy hogs that need rebuilding, you don't have to look much further than the data center down the hall. Virtualization, energy management and --frankly -- new data centers hold the promise for energy consumption management on a large scale with immediate, visible returns. 

4. Efficiency. The big, positive driver in the economic realm continues to be increases in efficiency. If you can be more efficient in delivering products and services to your customer, you can enjoy increasing profits and increased distance from your less efficient competitors. In the digital economy efficiency can mean eliminating physical products (computerizing medical records), eliminating physical distance (video conferencing and home-based workforces) and eliminating vendor and customer lag time (realtime pricing, realtime inventory management). Digital efficiency reguires application development that can quickly define processes and develop apps that automate those processes. In the current economic climate, companies that cannot create new efficiencies are destined for disaster.

5. Education. Real time learning, distance learning and the need to build new intellectual capabilities for new initiatives will finally drive digital learning from a nice idea to a necessity. You can't create a "green" driven workforce unless you can teach those skills to a new generation of engineers, designers and workers quickly and efficiently. Education may be the area that gets the most attention as government officials and bureaucrats quickly realize that without a workforce skilled in new capabilities, all those billions of infrastructure investment dollars will sit idle.