IFIP/IEEE IM 2009 - Distinguished Experts Panel (Part 2)

The theme of IM 2009, "Making Management Scalable, Robust, Cost-effective and Revenue Generating", points to key issues of a technical and business nature that the field has been trying to address for many years, yet continues to struggle with. At the same time, this has not prevented dramatic progress in the technologies they manage. Networks continue to grow, communication services are getting ever more pervasive, and innovation in those services continues to grow. The question then arises, which impact does progress in management technology really have on the technology that it manages and its supporting businesses? Is the impact merely one of incremental improvements in economics, or is it more profound? If management was more scalable, robust, cost-effective, and revenue generating than it is, what would be the impact on the managed technologies and their adoption? Would we see even more rapid progress, would we see different and more powerful services than we do today, or would there be entirely new classes of applications that would suddenly become feasible? In other words, is management a bottleneck? On the other hand, is management in reality doing just fine and its challenges mostly imagined? In which areas does progress in management really matter, and why? Panelists: Alexander Clemm (panel moderator), John Strassner, Alan Ganek, Joseph L. Hellerstein, Larry Bernstein, George Pavlou