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Life is a Highway, Part 3
January 11, 2010
For example, here’s an excerpt from a 2000 letter from Seppo Sillan, acting director of the Office of Program Administration of the Federal Highway Administration to a Kansas middle school student. In the letter, Sillan describes his first trip on the Interstate Highway System:
It was during the summer of 1962. Three friends and I were traveling from south Florida to Los Angeles, California, for summer jobs. The Interstate System had begun in 1956, but anyone traveling across country in 1962 would usually still have to use the old two-lane roads that crisscrossed the country. Most of our drive across the country was on regular two-lane roads except near Houston, Texas, where a section of new Interstate highway, Interstate Route 10, had been completed. I can well remember how much easier and how much safer it was to travel over that Interstate highway. The Interstate highways are the safest highways we have in this country and even in the world.
We are a very different people today than we would have been without the Interstate System. The Interstate System is such an important part of our lives that many Americans take it for granted, as if it were a natural phenomenon, like the Mississippi River. But the Interstate System is a 20th century civil engineering achievement so visionary in purpose, so immense in challenge, so integral to modern society that it has enriched America beyond the imagination of President Eisenhower and the other leaders who made it possible.
Embracing technology is essential to agility. We can only imagine how impossible it was to envision and conceive this extensive and well-designed Interstate Highway System (or the Great Wall of China, for that matter). If, as Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu stated, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then it is also true that all great technological advances begin with a plan. It took 70 years to realize the Interstate Highway dream of traveling to your destination at 70 miles per hour.
Today we can transmit (via packet technology) video, audio, and text messages in less then 1/70th of a second. What technology highway will you build for your organization? No one knows for sure, but as President Eisenhower himself said, “The plan is useless, but planning is essential.”
Start planning your highways today -- contact Tortus for a free technology plan!