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The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex has tremendous capabilities in the technology arena. The combination of a highly skilled workforce, large corporations, acceptable infrastructure, and good quality of life is an excellent calling card to be used to draw the best new technological companies to the area.

Efforts are currently underway to build on existing initiatives and to create around the Metroplex new corridors, research parks, and centers of excellence. Some examples include:

• The Richardson Telecom Corridor has undergone tremendous change in the last two years, and the "new" corridor will be at the forefront of the wireless telecommunications revolution.
  
• Lockheed Martin Corporation in West Fort Worth is building the world’s most advanced fighter jet. The $200 billion Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) project will make the Metroplex one of the leading centers for military technology.
  
• UT Southwestern continues to lead the nation in the areas of biotechnology and bioinformatics.
  
• Alliance Texas in North Fort Worth is at the forefront of e-logistics applications and aviation technology.
  
• The University of Texas at Dallas has brought Nobel Laureate Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid to lead UTD’s new Nanotech Institute, paving the way for UTD to become one of the world’s leading centers in nanotechnology research and development.
  
• North Texas Enterprise Center for Technology (NTEC for Technology) is being created in Frisco to address the medical profession’s technological needs.

Over the next two to five years, technology will continue to drive the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex’s economy. Technology will achieve significant expansion in the areas of medicine, national defense, and nanotechnology. In addition, technology innovation will expand from a few high-profile corridors to a number of geographically dispersed areas around the Metroplex. These "technodes" will focus on the commercial applications of one or two key technological areas and will be funded through joint private/public/academic partnerships. This report represents the beginning of a long-term research project by The University of Texas at Dallas to address the key environmental variables associated with successful technology ventures. Sixteen variables and over 300 data sources have been identified and data streams established into the Center for Information Technology and Management (CITM), The School of Management at UTD.

This report was created with the timeliest data available. However, some of the data is dated and is not as useful as it could be. In addition, the inferential knowledge gained from comparing the many variables is not currently available. To address these issues, CITM is establishing a research consortium to build a data warehouse to store the information from the various data streams. The data warehouse will collect information in real time from the various data streams that the Center identifies, thus providing more timely – and consequently relevant – data for future reports. In addition, the data warehouse will allow us to mine the data for the knowledge contained in the relationships among the data, shedding new light on the relationships between the variables and the resulting effect on technology in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

Since this report is an ongoing effort, we encourage you to provide feedback and additional information for use in future reports. You can visit http://citm.utdallas.edu/dtbc.htm and complete a brief survey and provide additional information and sources of data for use in future reports. We encourage your participation in this ongoing research effort. It is a great opportunity to help define the future of technology in the Metroplex.

Michael J. Savoie, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Information Technology and Management