#1. Elevator Speech

You are at work waiting in the lobby for the elevator that takes you to your office on the 10th floor. A coworker joins you as you step into the elevator, turns to you, and says, "I hear you are doing a Doctor of IT program at Walden. Why are you doing that program?" How do you respond so that by the time you reach the 10th floor your coworker not only understands why you are in the program, but also believes you made a good choice?

Create and submit an elevator speech of approximately 350-500 words geared to coworkers or professional colleagues. Using an appropriate tone and level of detail for this target audience, make sure to include the following information:

• Why you have matriculated into this applied doctorate degree program

• How successful completion of the program will help you meet your personal and professional goals, as well as advance your career

• What is "cool" about this program as explained from one tech person to another

#2. Discussion HotTopics-Extending Discussion

A core component of a doctoral program is research. The goals of a particular area of research are not always the same. Some areas you research at a high level; whereas other areas you research at a deeper level in order to make a scholarly contribution to the field. This week, you are introduced to this deeper analysis by selecting a colleague's posting from last week's Hot Topics Discussion and finding at least one resource that supports or refutes the analysis of the societal implications of a contemporary technology.

This task is more than agreeing or disagreeing with a colleague or simply offering an APA reference for an article; it is engaging in scholarly dialogue. As such, your contribution to this dialogue should introduce a new point and/or substantiate an existing point by introducing relevant evidence drawn from credible sources.

To prepare for this Discussion, select a colleague's response from the Week 1 Hot Topics Discussion. Deepen the Discussion by finding additional scholarly resources that support or refute your colleague's analysis of the implications. Extend the Discussion by integrating these resources and your own thoughts into a continuation of your colleague's posting.

I select this colleaguehis name is John:

Discussion 2

Hot Topics-Technological Implications
Distributed manufacturing

The way we make and deliver products from a factory is influenced by the distributed manufacturing. The distributed manufacturing has both raw materials and methods of manufacturing are in separate locations and the final product is manufactured near the final customer. The customer does not need to go far to get the products unlike in the traditional manufacturing where raw materials are brought together, assembled and assembly/construction in large centralized factories into identical finished products that are then sent to the customer.

The aim of the distributed manufacturing is to reduce the interaction of supply chains involved from supply of raw materials to the factory to supply of final finished products to consumers and replace them with digital information. To manufacture a chair, for example, rather than sourcing wood and fabricating it into chairs in a central factory, digital plans for cutting the parts of a chair can be distributed to local manufacturing hubs using computerized cutting tools known as CNC routers. Parts can then be assembled by the consumer or by local fabrication workshops that can turn them into finished products. One company already using this model is the U.S. furniture company AtFAB.

Current uses of distributed manufacturing rely heavily on the DIY Maker movement, in which supporters use their own local 3-D printers and make products out of local materials. The consumers can modify products to their own taste and needs. The creative design element from various consumers causes products to take an evolutionary behaviour as more people get involved in conceptualizing, visualizing and producing them instead of being centrally driven.

The positive and negative effects that distributed manufacturing has on the society and IT industry are:

• Reduce the overall environmental impact of manufacturing: digital information is conveyed over the Web rather than physical products via road, rail or water; and raw materials are sourced locally Enable a more efficient use of resources, with less wasted capacity in centralized factories.

• Lowers the barriers to market entry by reducing the amount of capital required to build the first prototypes and products.

• Reduce the amount of energy required for transportation.

• Disrupt traditional labor markets and the economics of traditional manufacturing as it becomes widespread.

• Difficult to regulate and control remotely manufactured medical devices, for example, whereas products such as weapons may be illegal or dangerous.

• May encourage broader diversity in objects that are today standardized, such as smartphones and automobiles. Scale is no object: one U.K. company, Facit Homes, uses personalized designs and 3-D printing to create customized houses to suit the consumer. Product features will evolve to serve different markets and locations of diverse geographies and there will be a rapid propagation of goods and services to regions of the world not currently well served by traditional manufacturing.

References

1. Meyerson (2015) From autonomous drones to emergent AI to digital genomes, The World Economic Forum
2. Technology and Globalization http://www.globalization101.org