…Although Enterra Solutions helped establish the Institute, it is independent from Enterra’s commercial ventures. We deliberately sought a forum that would make it clear that Enterra’s involvement is not a subterfuge to attract business or tap free labor. That is why the academic association is so important. The company does support the Institute with pro bono assistance (I serve as Executive Director and Shane Deichman, another Enterra employee, serves as Managing Director). Our interest, however, is advancing technologies and ideas, not generating business leads.

We do hope that some of the work that we do in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory finds it way into Institute publications so that it can be discussed and applied in other sectors to make them more resilient. The most promising of these ventures, and the one discussed in the Esquire article, is ResilienceNet™. ResilienceNet is Enterra’s concept to complement Oak Ridge National Lab’s SensorNet program.

ResilienceNet is an intelligent, rules-based sense, think, and act application that enables decision support and secure information sharing based on real-time data sources such as SensorNet. SensorNet is an ORNL research program that addresses technical challenges associated with real-time sensor systems for national security and other large applications. ORNL and Enterra Solutions are collaborating to enable advanced ResilienceNet applications to interface with SensorNet interoperability standards. These tools will create an automated sense, think, and act capability in response to Chemical, Nuclear, Biological, Cyber and Explosive threats that should make existing nuclear emergency response capabilities even more effective“

The important aspect of the Esquire piece, aside from the nice honorific element, is that it will help take the concept of ” resiliency” out of the esoteric realm of defense intellectuals, network theorists and adolescent psychologists and inject it into the world of mainstream journalism and political discourse. Making organizations, networks, institutions and America itself more resilient requires tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of decisions by local and midstream deciders.

“Opting for resilience” is non-obvious from a short-term balance sheet perspective. It requires some education and diffusion of knowledge throught the culture so that the resiliency becomes a standard ” option in play” when entrepreneurs, agencies and communities are planning for the future. As it stands, in most public debates, the benefits of building resiliency is usually understood only by engineers who usually prove less persuasive before political bodies than do bean-counters or self-aggrandizing special interest voices.

( A second personal aside: in a fit of civic idealism, I once served for a number of years on a planning commission for a midwestern municipality; a commission that had unusually broad powers over economic development. As a rule, engineers do not win arguments with lawyers when the judges are laymen, unless the engineer can point – in bold colors – to the imminent disaster some proposed course of action will cause. Hypothetical but reasonable probabilities are a concept that is totally lost on the general public)

Steve has a company. Enterra is not in the business of losing money. But in preaching the gospel of resilience, Steve is also working toward the public good. A public that must live in a world that increasingly resembles an ecology as much as an economy – a dynamic, complex, adaptive system whose evolution appears to be acclerating even as it’s internal ” brakes” and ” circuit-breakers” are being eliminated. Resiliency cannot be done by an American GOSPLAN, it is something that people will choose if they understand the advantages.

When the next Hurricaine Katrina or a biological 9/11 hits, America will discover that resiliency is not an option.

ADDENDUM:

Dan of tdaxp – “Web 3.0“

Asia Logistics Wrap – “Semantic Web for the Supply Chain“

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