Next generation critical infrastructures: the push and pull to real-time

Critical services such as electricity, water, transportation and telecommunication increasingly present us with a paradoxical situation. Society demands ever higher reliability of these services as we grow more dependent on them, while at the same time the conventional organizational means with which to ensure that high reliability are being dismantled. Deregulation, unbundling, technological innovation, new environmental requirements - all of these developments have made the provision of highly reliable services through critical infrastructures more and more the product of networks of organizations, rather than individual organizations. A key question for next generation infrastructures is therefore: how can networks of organizations, many with competing goals and interests, provide highly reliable services in the absence of conventional forms of command and control and in the presence of rapidly changing circumstances, technologies and demand? This work reports on extensive field research that suggests the answer is: critical infrastructures increasingly rely on real-time management to maintain reliability in the face of complexity and change.