 In this video, we'll be taking an overview to technology networks and network analysis. An approach to the analysis of technology that is based on network theory and focused on interpreting our engineered environment in terms of connectivity and network structure. We'll be looking at how globalization and the Internet of Things are driving heightened connectivity and the emergence of a new architecture, what we'll be calling technology networks. Where our engineered systems become unbundled from their traditional vertically integrated structure distributed out and reconfigured through networks. This module is an overview we won't be going into any of the details of network analysis. Our main learning objective is to understand how heightened connectivity is fundamentally reshaping our technology infrastructure and giving rise to the emergence of these technology networks. Over the past few decades, with the rise of information technology and globalization, we've networked our world. Global logistics networks that enable global manufacturing networks, multinational gas and power grids where energy gets traded across borders. Dense, multimodal urban transportation networks with all of these networks being supported by telecommunications networks on all levels from the local to the global. Today our everyday lives are embedded within and enabled by a mass of technology networks. And as we transit further into the 21st century this is only set to increase as it has become apparent that networks are the fundamental organizational structure to the information age. Understanding these networks is central to analyzing our globalized world of what is sometimes called hyperconnectivity brought about by the exponential growth in connectivity across almost all areas. But this huge and rapid proliferation in connectivity has left us in a world of often unknown interconnections and interdependencies that we're still scrambling to make sense of. Modeling and analyzing these networks is the subject to the domain of network science. The study of networks has in the past few decades gone from almost complete obscurity to one of the hottest topics in research today. By combining the formal mathematical language of graph theory with network analysis software and new data sources we're starting to get a real picture to what some of these complex engineered systems actually look like. As we go from a system with a relatively low level of connectivity to one with a very high level of connectivity the makeup and behavior of the system changes fundamentally. In relatively isolated systems our focus is on the components and their properties. Due to the high cost of interaction the system is typically bound into a centralized monolithic configuration to reduce the organization's overall cost of transactions. But when we reduce the cost of interaction as IT, transport and other innovations have done then connectivity increases and the system can become unbundled from its centralized configuration as components become distributed out and re-coordinated through the network. As an example we might think about manufacturing. Traditionally the majority of components for a technology were manufactured in a single factory or at least by a single company. As transportation and outsourcing costs have dropped manufacturing processes have started to span the globe integrating many diverse processes to deliver a finished product. Going forward manufacturing is set to become even more distributed as it becomes internet-based with the rise of digital manufacturing and 3D printing. Connectivity is really a very abstract concept and in many ways it is quite counter-intuitive because it really requires us to see things in a different way. Network analysis is a very practical tool but it is also a paradigm. It gives us a more appropriate way of looking at these highly interconnected systems one that is less focused on the static components in the system and more on the nexus of relations and how this shapes and defines the components. This is a very different way of seeing things to our traditional analytical approach that is central to understanding this networked world. With technology network analysis we're asking how the technology component is created by the network. At a certain level of connectivity we stop asking how the components create the connections and things become flipped around as we start to ask how the network creates the components or at least their properties. When the level of integration is high enough and the cost of interaction low enough there will be very many interactions as we get the emergence of an integrated system that means different functions performed and this feeds back to reshape the components. This is quite abstract so we'll take some examples to solidify it. We might ask how the city of Dubai has gone from complete insignificance as an air transportation centre to becoming a global hub surpassing London and Tokyo all within just a few years. To explain this we need to understand the network. Dubai lies along an important stop on the trade routes between Europe and Asia a key location in aviation's new Silk Road and it is within an eight hour flight from two thirds of the world's population. Dubai's rise as an air transportation hub is largely because it connected into the global air transportation network and performed a special differentiated function that the rest of the network required. This differentiated node was created by the network. Or to take another example from manufacturing China's rise as a manufacturing centre happened because it connected into the global logistics network and performed a specialised function that was required by the rest of the network. The point that's being illustrated here is that technologies don't just happen in isolation they are the product of a network that is delivering some service. They emerge out of this because they perform some function that the network requires to fulfil that service. Although we've been talking about this on the macro level in the form of globalization it is of course also a micro level phenomena as it describes the emerging paradigm of the internet of things a technology revolution currently taking place that will very likely reshape the whole architecture to our engineered environment on the micro level. To give it some formal terminology we might borrow this definition from the European research cluster on the internet of things. The internet of things IOT is a concept and a paradigm that considers pervasive presence in the environment of a variety of things slash objects that through wireless and wired connections and unique addressing schemas are able to interact with each other and cooperate with other things slash objects to create new applications slash services and reach common goals. In many ways we can think about the internet of things as the information revolution brought to our engineered environment as it networks our technologies in the same way that the web has networked our society. Within this paradigm technology is less about things and more about platforms. The internet of things is not a device or object it is a platform or network that integrates components in order to deliver functionality. Vertically defined standalone products and applications will become increasingly part of large networked horizontal systems and defined by their role within that network. When systems become unbundled devices and technologies are available for reconfiguration through different networks depending on the context and thus the context defines the service and the service defines the network which brings together the actual physical technology components. As we embed chips in technologies they are capable of adapting and configuring themselves in real time. This is driving a new networked architecture that is based around services called service orientated architecture also called SOA. There are many definitions for SOA but basically it is an architectural approach to creating systems built from autonomous services that are aggregated through a network. SOA supports the integration of various services through defined protocols and procedures that enable the construction of composite functions that draw from many different components to achieve their goal. It requires the unbundling of monolithic systems and the conversion of the individual components into services that are then made available to be reconfigured for different applications through the network. SOA originates in information systems design but with IoT information technology is starting to permeate and shape all areas of technology and make this SOA paradigm more pervasive as it reflects the emerging next generation structure to our technology landscape as it is being built on IoT. Of course we still need physical technologies machines, devices, turbines and airplanes but as we network our world the next generation of technologies is not so much about these things in the way that it was during the industrial age but instead about services enabled by networks that connect up things to deliver functionality. In this short module we've been taking an overview to technology networks as we talked about the network paradigm that focuses our view on connectivity and network structure. How, when a technology system reaches a critical level of connectivity its whole architecture changes as the components become increasingly defined in the network instead of their properties in isolation. We talked about how globalization and IoT are driving this next generation of technology networks. By giving examples on both the micro and the macro level we've tried to show how this transition into a networked information age is truly an omnipresent and structural phenomena. We finally looked at how this shift to a network paradigm applies to a sewer framework an architectural approach to creating systems built from autonomous services that are aggregated through networks.