This
document contains a list of trends I have identified based upon quotes
from managers, professionals, consultants, journalists, futurists, and
educators who study the ways we will work in the digital age.
I have grouped them the following topic areas. Click on a topic to jump
to the corresponding section of the document.
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What
is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs. ... What is
disappearing is the very thing itself: the job. That much sought
after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species
that has outlived its evolutionary time. A century from now Americans
will look back and marvel that we couldnt see more clearly
what was happening. ... The modern world is on the verge of another
huge leap in creativity and productivity, but the job is not going
to be part of tomorrows economic reality. There still is and
will always be enormous amounts of work to do, but it is not going
to be contained in the familiar envelopes we call jobs. In fact,
many organizations are today well along the path toward being de-jobbed.
The job is a social artifact, though it is so deeply embedded in
our consciousness that most of us have forgotten its artificiality
or the fact that most societies since the beginning of time have
done just fine without jobs. The job is an idea that emerged early
in the 19th century to package the work that needed doing in the
growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrializing nations.
Before people had jobs, they worked just as hard but on shifting
clusters of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set
by the sun and the weather and the needs of the day. The modern
job is a startling new idea -- and to many, an unpleasant and perhaps
socially dangerous one. ... Now the world is changing again: The
conditions that created jobs 200 years ago -- mass production and
the large organization -- are disappearing. ... Todays organization
is rapidly being transformed from a structure built out of jobs
into a field of work needing to be done. Jobs are artificial units
superimposed on this field. ... Jobs are no longer socially adaptive.
That is why they are going the way of the dinosaur. ... Michael
Hammer, the consultant who has done most to advance reengineering,
leaves no doubt where he stands: Middle management as we currently
know it will simply disappear. Three-quarters of middle managers
will vanish, he says, many returning to the real work they did before
they were promoted into management, with the remainder filling a
role that will change almost beyond recognition. To
oversimplify, there will be two main flavors of managers: process
managers and employee coaches. Process managers will oversee, end
to end, a reengineered process, such as order fulfillment or product
development. ... Employee coaches will support and nurture employees
-- much as senior managers do in corporate America today.
Source: William Bridges, The End of the Job,
Fortune, September 19, 1994, pp. 62-74.
-
"The
changed model of a career follows from the changed nature of work.
... the job -- a more-or-less set task you do every
day -- is disappearing as routine office and factory work are automated.
We spend our days on projects: designing a new jet liner, launching
a product, preparing a lawsuit, reengineering the billing process.
Projects are conceived, staffed up, completed, and shut down. ...
Three things are new:
- You no
longer have a choice; the old path is gone. Companies used reengineering
to jackhammer out the middle-manager staircase, and now rely
on computers to gather and analyze information.
- Businesses
have redrawn their boundaries, making them both tight (as they
focus on core competencies) and porous (as they outsource noncore
work). As a result, work follows a contractor-subcontractor
model, not one of vertical integration.
- The third
change is scale. Project-based work has been the norm for decades
in industries like construction, Hollywood, and many professional
services. Now even the bastions of bureaucratic careerism are
breached."
Source:
Thomas A. Stewart, "Planning a Career in a World Without Managers,"
Fortune, March 20, 1995, pp. 72-80
-
"We're
coming to see that the period after the Second World War, and maybe
even the period from the 1890s on, is the exception to the historical
rule. It is a period of very high social security, relatively. Many
more people living stabler lives than ever before. It's a period
in which these jobs ... became the norm. To work was to have a job.
... And I don't think it ever occurred to anybody until pretty late
in the '80s -- well, some scholars must have seen it ... that this
experience we were having was historically unusual and might not
last. And I think what has happened is that it is historically unusual
and it hasn't lasted. ... "
Source:
Willaim Bridges (author
of
JobShift), interviewed by Peter Leyden in "
On the Edge of the Digital
Age," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, 1995
-
"My
advice to you in these uncertain times, " Robert Allen says, "is
that you would be wise to create multiple streams of income! According
to Business Week, (May 9, 1994), Americans are losing their jobs
every day and I don't see this trend changing any time soon."
Source:
"Create Multiple Streams of Income"
-
Losing
a job is one thing. Losing the very concept of the job as the way
to organize work is another. Yet our economy, driven by the proliferation
of digital technologies, is hurtling toward a time when working
in jobs as we know them will not be the predominant way we get things
done. In the Digital Age, we will still work. We will still earn
livings. We will still produce things and provide services. But
the majority of us likely won't go off to "jobs" each day.
Source: Peter Leyden,
The Coming Trauma,
in "
On the
Edge of the Digital Age," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune,
1995
-
"Shoppers
able to use home computers for banking and arranging insurance by
the end of the decade will devastate jobs in those industries ...
Independent consultancy INTECO said travel, housing, utility and
public service sectors will also be hit as companies cut costs by
using computers to communicate directly with their customers. ...
The implications of home shopping and digital delivery on
employment in retail and white-collar service industries could be
viewed as potentially catastrophic, said Graham Taylor, INTECO
vice-president and author of the report. Digital delivery
poses a threat to large blocks of workers in businesses such as
banks, travel agencies, utilities and public services.
Source: Neil Winton, Cyber-shopping to
Devastate Banking, Service Industry Jobs, Article carried
on the Reuters news service, June 22, 1995.
-
"According
to a report issued by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu International, modern
banks on both sides of the Atlantic may be forced to close half
of their branches if they are to stay competitive and offer the
best service to customers. The reason for the closures is, the report
claims, quite simple -- information technology is making many of
the bands paper-heavy activities obsolete, and will result
in many jobs simply ceasing to exist as electronic transactions
take over. In the UK, this could mean half of the banking industry
jobs -- 50,000 -- disappearing over the coming years.
Source: IT Will Lead to 50% of Bank Branches Closing,
Newsbyte news service article, June 12, 1995
-
Our
investigation of the long-term effects of this one development --
cheap bandwidth that will be leveraged by every enterprise to continually
reduce transaction costs -- reveals that it will destroy between
20 million and 25 million jobs in North America. Hardest hit will
be retail, wholesale, and the service portions of every business.
Source: Michael Moon,
Dirt-Cheap
Bandwidth and the Coming Revolution,
Electronic Buyer
News, January 31, 1994, p. 44
-
"The
future will not be so much a story of the haves and have nots as
it will of the 'theres' and 'there nots' -- those who have to be
there and those who don't. Two hundred years ago, the Industrial
Revolution centralized the workforce. The Information Revolution
will reverse the process, eventually sending half of us or more
back home. The relatively brief era in history during which an adult
could enter the workforce, be employed for four decades by a single
enterprise, and retire with a pension and a gold watch is gone forever.
We are returning to a society based on hunting and gathering. We
will eat as weall as we can forage -- for ideas, entertaining images,
or services that can be performed for others for a profit. And we
will all have to forage."
Source: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future:
Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, Doubleday, 1993,
p. vii
-
"AT&T
LAYS OFF 40,000; IBM, 35,000; and Chase, 12,000. When news like
this hits, as it has a lot lately, it gets millions thinking: Could
I be next? You can't blame them. Perhaps the only thing certain
in this age of delayering is the notion that some time in your career
you're going to get caught in the turbulence of a downsizing. After
all, corporate America's obsession with cost cutting is no temporary
trend. When asked when it would all end, the British consultant
Charles Handy, who has been writing books on the American workplace
for decades, flatly replied: 'Never.' Get used to it. The familiar
forces driving downsizing--increased foreign competition, Wall Street's
obsession with shareholder value, the changing nature of technology--aren't
about to go away. If you still need convincing, the American Management
Association, in a survey of 1,000 companies conducted last June,
estimated that 60% would eliminate jobs over the next year--the
highest percentage in the survey's history."
Source: Ronald B. Lieber, "
How
Safe is Your Job?"
Fortune, April 1, 1996
-
"Indeed,
a massive power shift from the center to the periphery is occuring
everywhere. Organization Man has become a consultant, thanks to
technology resources once available only to the largest enterprises.
And top-down corporate hierarchies are flattening into horizontal,
decentralized networks of self-governing work teams. But this flattening
process is also crushing and marginalizing millions of once-productive
citizens. Whole strata of blue-collar and white-collar workers are
being 'downsized' into oblivion, their work now performed more efficiently
by networked information systems or farmed out to cheap-labor production
centers in new global markets overseas."
Source: Daniel Burstein and David Kline, Road Warriors,
1995
-
"Even
the smallest company can use the Internet to exchange data with
cusomers or suppliers on the other side of the world."
Source: Mary J. Cronin, Doing Business on the Internet,
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994, p. 5
-
"I
think we are in the midst of a rather momentous transition in how
we work and conduct business. In the future we will surely look
back with amazement on the emergence of global computer internetworking
over the span of a single decade. It will be recognized as the phenomenon
that made personal computing synonymous with personal communication.
The PC revolution started in a very real way when the spreadsheet
allowed the PC to supercede the calculator. The revolution continued
when word-processing packages made typewriters obsolete. Now the
Internet is on a trajectory to make telephones and fax machines
far less critical. Or to put it differently, the Internet will allow
personal computers to incorporate telephone and fax-machine capabilities
at a net savings, so to speak. The Internet puts the smallest company
on an equal footing with the largest conglomerates when it comes
to transacting commerce globally. It seems plausible that marketing
will be one of the big opportunities in the long haul."
Source: Bill Washburn, quoted in "Interview with CIX Director
Bill Washburn", Jeff Ubois, Internet World, July/August 1994.
-
"One
thing we do know is that the telecommunications revolution will
enlarge the role of the individual with more access to information,
greater speed in execution, and greater ability to communicate to
anyone or to great numbers of people anywhere. ... All trends are
in the direction of making the smallest player in the global economy
more and more powerful."
Source: John Naisbitt, Global Paradox: The Bigger the
World Economy, the More Powerful Its Smallest Players, William
Morrow and Company, 1994
-
"Computer
networks give every hacker the creative potential of a factory tycoon
of the industrial era and the communications power of a TV magnate
of the broadcasting era."
Source: George Gilder, Forbes ASAP, March 1993
-
"The
Boardwatch Web
site runs on a 386SX 20 Mhz machine that lays on its side and we
cant find the cover or most of the pieces for it. It handles
about a thousand readers per day (not document hits - people). Our
link is a 56 Kbps leased line we were very proud of a couple of
years ago. Now you can get 115 Kbps on an ISDN connectioin at much
lower cost. It looks to me like you can do a modestly competent
web server for about $500 and we didn't have any investors at all.
... We should see an absolute cornucopia of new tool development
to take advantage of the connectivity of the Internet and yes, WWW.
There are 13-year-olds with compilers out there that will ultimately
be the millionaire software developers a couple of years from now.
Exciting times."
Source: Jack Richard (Editor/Publisher),
Boardwatch Magazine,
March 1995, p. 21.
-
"There
will be networked PC servers 'in nearly every office, manufacturing
facility, store, school and home' by the end of the decade, according
to Eckhard Pfeiffer, president and chief executive officer of Compaq
Computer. The boundaries between private and public networks and
between personal and corporate computing, as well as between the
computer and the network, will dissolve as we head towards the 21st
Century. 'Wherever you may be, with whatever kind of device you
have, the network will adapt to your level of interest and to the
capabilities of your device,' said the Compaq boss. Pfeiffer also
predicted the evolution of a new distributed enterprise computing
model in which "corporations would run their businesses using an
array of hundreds, even thousands, of specialized application servers:
mail messaging servers, gateway servers, decision support servers,
video and Internet servers."
Source: "Networks Everywhere, Says Compaq Boss Following
Record 3Q," Newsbyte report, October 17, 1995
-
"On
the Net each person can be an unlicensed TV station. Three and a
half million camcorders were sold in the United States during 1993.
Every home movie wont be a prime-time experience (thank God).
But we can now think of mass media as a great deal more than high
production value, professional TV. Telecommunications executives
understand the need for broadband into the home. They cannot fathom
the need for a channel of similar capacity in the reverse direction.
... In the near future, individuals will be able to run electronic
video services in the same way that fifty-seven thousand Americans
run computer bulletin boards today. Thats a television landscape
of the future that is starting to look like the Internet, populated
by small information producers. In a few years yo can learn how
to make couscous from Julia Child or a Moroccan housewife. You can
discover wines with Robert Parker or a Burgundian vintner."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, Alfred
Knopf, 1995, p. 176
-
"Viaweb
Inc., a Cambridge startup, today announced its flagship product,
Live Store(TM), the first system to allow end-users to create high-quality,
secure online stores. Anyone with a copy of Netscape Navigator(TM)
can create a site on Viaweb's server using a simple forms-based
interface. In less than an hour, someone with no knowledge of HTML
can create a secure online store and start taking orders on the
Web. 'Our customers are amazed when they see that they've created
an online store in 30 minutes," said Viaweb President Paul Graham.
"Customers who have never had even a simple home page have been
able to create sophisticated online stores.' ... 'For $100 a month,
anyone can compete with the giants," Graham said. "Small and medium-sized
merchants no longer have to settle for crude, awkward Web sites
without secure ordering. With Live Store, anyone can create a great-looking,
secure site.'"
Source: "Viaweb Lets Users Create Own Web Storefront
in Minutes," Business Wire article, February 13, 1996
-
"Have
you ever cut a feature-length film on your home computer? You will.
AT&T wont bring it to you, but 28-year-old Paul Budnitz
might. A Yale graduate who majored in fine art, Budnitz edited his
feature, 93 Million Miles From the Sun, in his living room.
... Budnitz cut the film digitally on a consumer-grade Macintosh
using Adobe Premiere software and a Radius videocard. ... The entire
edit cost only $700, and the whole film, from start to finish (including
digital sound postproduction at George Lucas Skywalker Sound
studios), cost a mere $30,000."
Source: Shoshana Berger, "Film Hacker," Wired,
April 1996, p.45
-
"For
the entrepreneur, the increasing "personalization" of wealth creation
opens up vast new possibilities. Consider the hypothetical case
of hedge-fund managers that use raw information to develop a proprietary
analysis about the likely movements of a certain currency. They
then use computer trading technology to accumulate huge positions
in this currency. With communications technology, they are able
to monitor their positions and analyze technical details on a moment-by-moment
basis. Perhaps these hedge-fund managers also use the media to publicize
their strategy - or to convey disinformation - to the markets. Eventually,
the markets begin to move in a favorable direction, and, again using
their computers and communications tools, they sell their positions
for $2 billion. $2 billion. One man, with a small team of assistants,
may have just made $2 billion in a few weeks' time for himself and
his investors. He needed no physical raw materials. He needed no
significant number of employees to carry this off, he needed little
in the way of physical facilities. The computer and communications
tools he used may be comparatively expensive, or they could actually
be no more powerful than the systems his children play with at home.
Either way, there is an infinitesimal cost of doing this kind of
business that bears scant relation to the way manufacturing machinery
is used to create value. ... Although such astronomical people-to-value
ratios reveal themselves most dramatically in the financial services
business, it is by no means confined there. Something similar, minus
some of the decimal places, is happening across a whole range of
businesses and at various scales within the economy. "
Source: David Kline, "
To Have and Have Not,"
Hotwired, December 18, 1995
-
"'As
broadband two-way multimedia infrastructures are being put into
place, highly talented entrepreneurs all across America are coming
up with new ways to utilize these networks by creating the very
content that will soon be delivered to all our homes via this remarkably
fast medium,' said James M. Phillips, Motorola corporate vice president
and general manager of the company's Multimedia Markets division."
Source: " Motorola Launches Broadband Initiative,"
Newsbytes News Network article, March 19, 1996
-
The
story of publishing is a story of barriers. The process of publishing
-- books, magazines, newspapers, music, art -- creates barriers
to entry, keeping a library-full of potential publishers from ever
setting print to page. And the tyrannies of physical distribution
creates barriers to access, walling away avid readers from the rich
information sources for which they hunger. But the online world
-- the future home of electronic content -- rips aprat these traditional
barriers, freeing the creative community to wallpaper the world
with its words, sounds and images, and letting readers roam unchecked
through the halls of cyberspace. ... Because it potentially changes
much of the nature of publishing and empowers creator and consumer,
we should come to recognize the online environment for what it is:
The incubator of the content of tomorrow. ... All of these characteristics
make the vast on-line canvas a creativity magnet, drawing the artistic
community like iron filings. The on-line world will soon be the
home for the germinating seeds of every kind of content imaginable.
Books, magazines, and newspapers, of course. But also radio,
television, and movies, and their crossover kinds
of content.
Source: Gary A. Bolles (Editor-in-Chief),
The Incubator
of Content,
http://www.ziff.com/~intweek/,
March 27, 1995, p. 14.
-
While
the state-of-the-art advances in technology have enabled artists
such as filmmakers and musicians to create works with less financial
resources than has been traditionally necessary, one area that continues
to be a stumbling block is distribution. ... Happily for many of
these artists, the lack of distribution is beginning to be less
of a problem thanks to the Internet -- and to such sites as
Kaleidospace, the first World Wide Web site
devoted to the distribution and recognition of works created by
independent artists and musicians.
Source: Andy Marx, New Wave Web: Kaleidospace Peddles
Art,
http://www.ziff.com/~intweek/,
March 27, 1995, p. 22.
-
Whats
to stop artists from making and selling their own product, without
labels? Whats to stop customers from one day making their
own CDs, paying for and pulling digital information off satellites,
cables or fiber optic lines and using laser printers to spit out
a CD jacket? The answer: Nothing! Anythings possible in todays
wild world of business. The gumption of entrepreneurs coupled with
the 24-hour electronic flow of capital they can access worldwide
means that competitors suddenly turn up out of nowhere, and traditional
barriers to entry in any business fall like bricks in an earthquake.
Source: Oren Harari, The Hypnotic Danger of Competitive
Analysis, Management Review, August 1994, p. 36.
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"The
home is increasingly a place to work, learn, and to be entertained
... soon it will be a center of commerce. ... The point of purchase
is moving to the individual. This changes everything: how companies
market, what they sell, how they deliver. ... Old strategic models
will have to go. What will come in their place: the individual.
... Direct advertising in reverse ... a world where consumers find
data electronically on companies, products, and services they're
interested in and initiate contact. ... We're entering an era of
collaborative commerce."
Source: JoAnn Stone, "
Buyers in the Driver's Seat,"
Perspective, Spring 1994
-
"What
the Net is, more than anything else at this point, is a platform
for entrepreneurial activities -- a free market economy in its truest
sense. It's a level playing field where people can do anything they
want to."
Source: Marc Andreessen, quoted by Chip Bayers, "Why Bill
Gates Wants To Be the Next Marc Andreessen," Wired, December 1995
-
"America's
wealth has always been highly personal. But in the digital era,
the process of wealth creation has begun to take on a "personalized"
character never before seen, even in the age of the great robber
barons. This is definitely not your father's generation of wealth
creation. Because of the new economic forces and structures at work
in the digital revolution, a highly visible percentage of the new
wealth being created is flowing to individuals, entrepreneurs, and
small businesses - or at least to businesses that start small."
Source: David Kline, "To Have and Have Not," Hotwired
Market Forces Article, December 1995
-
"It
would be hard to overstate the potential implications of individual
empowerment in a 1:1 society. The proliferation of 1:1 media will
eventually make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to have immediate
access to incredibly sophisticated computing -- and communications
-- power. When video signals can be sent over the phone, anyone
with a phone and a television camera will be able to go into
the TV 'broadcasting' business. It won't really be broadcasting
-- it will just be telephoning -- and no license from a government
authority will be required. One thing this means is that instead
of getting 30 or 50 channels on your cable hookup, you'll be able
to dial up as many video signals as there are phone numbers and
people sending programs out for fun or profit."
Source: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One
Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, Doubleday,
1993, p. 353
-
"People
who ran those factories in the brute-force economy of the past liked
large numbers of predictable, interchangeable, dont-ask-why
workers for their assembly lines. And as mass production, mass distribution,
mass education, mass media, and mass entertainment spread through
the society, the Second Wave also created the masses.
Third Wave economies, by contrast, will require (and tend to reward)
a radically different kind of worker -- one who thinks, questions,
innovates, and takes entrepreneurial risk. Workers who are not easily
interchangeable. Put differently, it will favor individuality (which
is not necessarily the same as individualism)."
Source: Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Getting
Set for the Coming Millennium, The Futurist, March-April
1995, p. 14
-
"As
improvements in technology reduce the costs of communication and
coordination, the most desirable way of making many decisions moves
through three stages. In the first stage, when communication costs
are high, the best way to make decisions is with decentralized,
independent decision-makers. ... But as the costs of communication
fall, it becomes desirable in many cases to bring remote information
together in one place where centralized decision-makers can see
a more global perspective and make better decisions than isolated
local decision-makers could. The economic history of the 20th century
has been, in large part, a story of centralizing economic decision-making
in large global corporations. ... But as communication costs continue
to fall even further, there comes a point for many decisions where
decentralized, connected decision makers can be even more effective
than centralized ones. These decentralized, connected decision-makers
can combine the best information available anywhere in the world
with their own local knowledge, energy, and creativity. As our economy
becomes increasingly based on creative innovation and "knowledge
work", and as new technologies make it possible to connect decentralized
decision-makers on a scale never before possible in history, exploiting
these opportunities for "empowerment" may well be one of the most
important themes in the economic history of the next century."
Source: Thomas W. Malone, "
Inventing The Organizations
Of The 21st Century: Control, Empowerment, And Information Technology,"
Multimedia Colloquium
1995. Harvard Business School
-
"A
desktop videoconferencing system costs less than a single business-class
flight. Boeing Co. itself relies on video meetings that reduce the
need to fly."
Source: Thomas Petzinger, Jr., "Four Lessons Our Airlines
Need to Learn," Wall Street Journal, November 6, 1995,
p. B1.
-
"British
Telecom (BT) has predicted that, within the next three years, visual
communications will become as commonplace as mobile phone or fax
usage. This prediction, made by Adrian Butcher, BT's general manager
of visual solutions, is being backed by a major impetus within BT
as a whole to service the anticipated demand. 'Visual communications
is one of BT's six major national business themes and is a critical
part of the company's future.' ... Butcher claims that BT is already
changing the way in which businesses work. 'For example, visual
solutions are changing the way in which personal finances are serviced
and how the health system operates,' he explained. According to
Butcher, however, these applications are only the tip of the iceberg.
'In the near future, visual communications will become as prevalent
in everyday life as the fax and mobile phone are today,' he said."
Source: "British Telecom Predicts Massive Growth in Visual
Comms," Newsbytes News Network article, November 29, 1995
-
"When
KPMG Peat Marwich consultants go to a client's office, they take
75,000 professionals with them. That may sound a little cramped,
but we're talking in virtual terms. Over the past few years Peat
Marwich has been crafting a 'knowledge base' that allows its consultants
to get a helping hand from their colleagues around the world. The
computer system that supports Peat Marwick's information access
needs is called Knowledge Manager. It lets employees make use of
a vast store of information and experiences about practically everything
associated with the company's accounting and consulting business.
'Down there on the battlefield, every professional that stands in
front of the client is Peat Marwick. We are directing the combined
intellectual assets of the firm down to a single point.' ... Knowledge
Manager is a groupware system that combines electronic messaging,
private and public bulletin boards, database access, forms processing,
and connections to public networks. ... 'It is multiple pieces of
information linked together with golden threads. We are the quintessential
knowledge organization. We don't sell widgets. We're the product.'
... Peat Marwick users will soon be able to use the Mosaic Web browser
as a front-end interface to Knowledge Manager. ... 'The way we view
Mosaic and HTML is it gives users the ability to represent knowledge
in the same way we build linkages in our brain. ... As knowledge
gets placed into the knowledge base, anyone can drink from it.'"
Source: Stephanie Stahl, "
Hire On One, Get 'Em All,"
InformationWeek, March 20, 1995, pp. 120-124.
-
"Coming
Soon: The CKO -- Some companies are creating room for a chief knowledge
officer to manage unstructured information. One may step they are
taking is to create this post ... to manage the process of capturing,
distributing, and effectively using
knowledge. Organizations
that have adopted this position include Hoffman-LaRoche, GE Lighting,
Xerox PARC, and several consultancies, including Ernst & Young,
Gemini, and McKinsey. ... Without someone like a CKO, organizational
learning and knowledge management will continue to be rhetorical
concepts, not realities."
Source: Tom Davenport, "
Management
Agenda,"
InformationWeek, September 5, 1994, p. 95.
-
"In
a Third Wave economy, the central resource -- a single word broadly
encompassing data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology,
and values -- is
actionable knowledge. ... The dominant form
of new knowledge in the Third Wave is perishable, transient, 'customized'
knowledge: the right information, combined with the right software
and presentation, at precisely the right time. ... The big change,
in other words, is the demassification of actionable knowledge."
Source: Ester Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and
Alvin Toffler, "C
yberspace and the American Dream:
A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,"
Progress and Freedom Foundation, 1995.
-
"No
longer do huge capital facilities determine who wins and loses in
competition. Managing intellect -- knowledge-based assets and knowledge
workers -- has become the centerpiece of profitability in virtually
all companies. ... In a world where the economists' land, labor,
and capital no longer explain wealth generation, we need new concepts
to capture and harness forces of economic growth. Intellect, intelligence,
ideas are the substance of production. The essence of management
now involves systematizing, supporting, and motivating these ephemeral
forces. ... Knowledge, and knowledge work, dominate the value chains
of virtually all companies -- whether in services or manufacturing."
Source: James Brian Quinn, Forward section of Charles D.
Winslow and William L. Bramer, FutureWork: Putting Knowledge
to Work in the Knowledge Economy, Free Press, 1994, p. vii
-
"Today,
the components of cost in many products is a function of the information
invested in them. Edmund Jenkins, the Arthur Andersen partner who
has chaired a task force of the American Institute of Certified
Public Accountants looking into ways to value information-intensive
assets more accurately, calls the new value equation 'R&D, intellectual
assets, and services.' Put another way, intellectual capital is
"material that has been formalized, captured, and leveraged to produce
a higher-valued asset," according to Ernst & Young's Larry Prusak.
And the capability of intellectual capital to yield wealth is growing
as companies learn to harness it. Betty Zucker, who studies knowledge
management at the Swiss-based Gottlieb Duttweiler Foundation, believes
that at best only 20 percent of the intellectual capital inside
most business organizations is being tapped or utilized. The real
boons to productivity and profitability lie ahead as digital technology,
combined with new attitudes and values, allows enterprises to use
more of their collective brain. Imagine the implications for a company
of increasing its utilization rate of intellectual capital from
20 percent to even just 30 percent. The information economy, with
its double digit annual growth rates, is comparable to having a
huge 'emerging market' within America's borders. Depending on which
digital business we are speaking about, growth rates for this sector
tend to be between three and 10 times faster than the rest of the
economy - and some, such as the Internet-related sector, are off
the charts entirely. "
Source: David Kline, "
The Alchemy of Wealth,"
Hotwired, December 18, 1995
-
"Revolutions
aren't made by gadgets and technology. They're made by a shift in
power, which is taking place all over the world. Today, intellectual
capital is at least as important as money capital and probably more
so. But the world's accounting system is based on hard assets you
can see and feel. We don't book-keep intellectual assets. Take the
relative market capitalizations of Microsoft and General Motors.
Microsoft, which has no fixed assets except a few buildings in Seattle,
has a market cap of $79 billion. General Motors, which has a lot
of assets, has a market cap of $38 billion. The marketplace is capitalizing
intellectual assets, while the accounting profession is not."
Source: Walter Wriston, "
The Future
of Money," Wired, October 1996
-
"Every
time we've increased the ability of people at Sun to communicate
electronically, good things have happened. So we just keep increasing
it. I can think of lots of interesting ways to use video. Let's
say Bill Joy is sitting in Aspen and he has an idea, and he wants
to start a discussion about it inside the company. He can do a video
and put it out on the Net. Suddenly the entire company can learn
from its most brilliant person. People can play it over and over
and have an electronic discussion. We are merging video, audio,
publishing, and telecommunications to create a new work environment
that lets us combine and distribute our collective wisdom."
Source: John Gage (Chief Scientists at Sun Microsystems),
"The Network is the Company," Fast Company, April/May, 1996
-
"The
power of the chip grows faster than the power of the host processor
running a vast system of many terminals. The power of the individual
commanding a single workstation increases far faster than the power
of an overall bureaucratic system. The organization of enterprise
follows the organization of the chip. Rather than pushing decisions
up through the hierarchy, the power of microelectronics pulls them
remorsely down to the individual."
Source: George Gilder, Microcosm, Simon and Schuster,
1989
-
"George
Gilder's 'Law of the Microcosm' is in charge. Digital economics
destroys all hierarchies."
Source: Mark Stahlman, "
The Trouble With the
NII," Informationweek, June 26, 1995, p. 144.
-
"Organizations
are learning-based societies. Organizations that have learned how
to learn, that are engaged by electronic bulletin boards with outside
organizations to which they are just slightly related, that are
hooked to universities and other learning centers -- they alone
will survive."
Source: Tom Peters, Liberation Management, Alfred
A. Knopf, 1992
-
"The
basic message is that the network creates the company--whether that
company is NetDay or Sun Microsystems. Your e-mail flow determines
whether you're really part of the organization; the mailing lists
you're on say a lot about the power you have. I've been part of
the Java group at Sun for four or five years. Recently, by mistake,
someone removed my name (John.Gage@eng.sun.com) from the Java e-mail
list. My flow of information just stopped--and I stopped being part
of the organization, no matter what the org chart said. I got back
on in a hurry. The best way to understand what's happening in a
company is to get to its alias file--the master list of all its
e-mail lists. Before the Web, I used the alias file as my main mechanism
for knowing what was going on at Sun. I didn't need anyone to tell
me when we were working on a new chip project. Suddenly there's
a new e-mail list, Sun Blazer, and I know what's happening. I didn't
need anyone to tell me Java was getting hot. There used to be 35
people on the Java alias list, then there were 120. Something's
happening. ... The Web is a step beyond e-mail. Putting up a Web
page means you have something to say. And the way you put it together
says a lot about who you are--not just the words but also the style,
and your links to other pages. "
Source: John Gage (Chief Scientists at Sun Microsystems),
"
The Network is
the Company,"
Fast Company, April/May, 1996
-
"The
West was born 500 years ago when Europe broke free of the centralized
control of the Roman Catholic Church. The resultant decentralized,
disorganized model served us phenomenally well from 1500 to 1850.
But in 1850, the US entered into the era of transcontinental railroads
and big centralized enterprises. We invented Wall Street because
these organizations needed more money than anyone had needed before.
From then until 1980, it was a different world. My hypothesis is
that 1850 to 1980 will be seen as a 130-year anomaly that is now
coming to a total end."
Source: Tom Peters, "Peters Provocations," Wired,
December 1997, p. 206.
-
"There
is a basic truth about documents: they have played a central role
in civilized societies as a repository of knowledge, as a conveyor
of information and affect, and as an empower of action. They have
served as the principal information currency of all civilizations."
Source: Roger E. Levien, "The Civilizing Currency: Documents
and Their Revolutionary Technologies," Technology 2001: The
Future of Computing and Communications, Derek Leebaert (Editor),
MIT Press, 1991, p. 208
-
"Business
professionals spend roughly 60 percent of their average workday
dealing with documents. ... If computers could directly and routinely
communicate all the documents that computer applications create,
communication would be more timely and efficient. You would use
your computer primarily to read, search, and print portions of electronically
distributed documents. Documents would become active elements of
communications. As a primary communication tool, computers would
become as indispensable as the telephone. Imagine a world where
the 'virtual document,' the active structured information you are
communicating, is the center of the computing universe and applications
and operating environments are merely tools to enable document interchange."
Source: John Warnock, "The New Age of Documents,"
Byte, January 1992, p. 257
-
"Today
we are living in the last age of print. The evidence of senescence,
if not senility, is all around us. ... Computer technology (in the
form of word processing, databases, electronic bulletin boards and
mail) is beginning to replace the printed book. ... The printing
press encouraged us to think of a written text as an unchanging
artifact, a monument to its author and its age. Printing also tended
to magnify the distance between the author and the reader, as the
author became a monumental figure, the reader only a visitor in
the author's cathedral. Electronic writing emphasizes the impermanence
and changeability of text, and it tends to reduce the distance between
the author and reader by turning the reader into an author."
Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and
the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale,
NJ 1991, p. 2
-
"The
desktop productivity category, if you look at software publishing
data of all of the software sold on PCs, is 59 percent of
all software sold. ... Over 80% of the worlds documents are
now created with these applications."
Source: Bill Gates, "The Office of the Future,"
Fall 1995 Comdex Keynote Address, November 14, 1995
-
-
"New
Internet tools from major vendors are helping to accelerate the
growth of corporate networks based on the World Wide Web, allowing
companies to develop their own private 'Intranets' for enterprise
applications and communications, both inside and outside the corporate
firewall. ... According to a study of 170 companies by the Business
Research Group, a market research firm in Boston, nearly a quarter
of companies already have implemented or plan to implement a Web
server as an internal groupware platform, or Intranet. An additonal
20% are studying the use of Web servers inside the corporation."
Source: "Intranet Tools," Informationweek, November
6, 1995
-
"
... a growing number of companies are ... applying Internet technology
for sharing information in their own corporate networks; they're
creating internal webs that finally let computers work the way they
are supposed to. ... intranets are catching on at places like Chevron,
Goodyear, Levi Strauss, and Pfizer. ... Simply put, companies want
the technology of the web because it makes it easier for computers
to finally start doing what we've wanted them to do all along. Surfing
an internal corporate web, employees use hypertext links to search
for and access text, graphics, audio, or video, all organized into
colorful documents called home pages. ... intranets connect the
different types of computers on your network, be they PCs, Macs,
or workstations. ... employees don't have to worry about where the
information is actually stored. Updating a spreadsheet that resides
on a workstation in Hong Kong is almost as easy as working on one
in your desktop PC. ... 'Within a year,' predicts Eric Schmidt,
chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, 'people who use computers
at work will spend the majority of their time with a web browser
in front of them.'"
- "US West
... employees in 14 states work together on the Global Village.
Some meet online chat rooms to exchange documents and discuss
projects. Salespeople use the web to keep in touch with managers
back in Denver. ... Workers in different departments create
their own home pages and keep their own documents current. 'We
have tapped the energy of all those managers and employees who
know how to type but don't know how to program.'"
- "The intranet
at Morgan Stanley links 37 offices around the world. 'The ability
to distrubte data and information seamlessly on a global basis
is a problem we have wrestled with for years. The web lets us
do it,' says Kevin Parker, the investment banks chief information
officer."
- "The internal
web at Turner Broadcasting is ... a laboratory where Turner
designers and producers try to figure out how best to repackage
content, such as cartoons or movies, before making it available
on the Internet."
Source:
Alison L. Sprout, "
The
Internet Inside Your Company,"
Fortune, November 27,
1995
-
"When
employees at Tyson Foods surf the Web, they're not plunging into
the Internet -- theyre accessing the latest corporate data
on their own private Web server. In-house communications for a company
the size of Tyson can be a costly and complicated challenge. With
100 remote sites world-wide and more than 5,000 employees using
corporate computing capabilities for information access, Tyson decided
to build its own Intranet. The Tyson Web hosts the corporate phone
database. Human Resources uses the system to publish employee manuals
and job postings. The companys credit union updates time-sensitive
financial news on a linked Web page. In the near future, every Tyson
department will have its own Web page, enabling fast and inexpensive
distribution of news, corporate policy changes and product data
company-wide."
Source:
Tyson Foods Wires Its Own Intranet
-
"The
"Intranet" is an ideal solution for any organization with more than
100 users, and/or with remote locations distributed over wide geographical
areas. It's an appropriate fit for any business that needs a cost-effective
way to disseminate constantly fluctuating information on demand
to its employees. "
Source:
Intranet -- A Guide to "Intraprise-Wide"
Computing
-
"The
emergence of the World Wide Web in 1995 will be marked as the most
dramatic event in business in the last decade of this century. In
a period of less than six months it has forced virtually every client
of The Chasm Group to rewrite their business plans--not amend them,
not revise them, REWRITE them. What has been added is a new communications
model--private publishing--which provides a one-to-many communications
model with no barrier to entry except being interesting enough to
attract hits to your home page. That, in turn, has created a new
addiction called Web-browsing, which puts a previous addiction,
remote TV-channel-switching, to shame. That, in turn, has created
enormous economic interest, first down the false trail of commerce,
now down a much more immediately rewarding trail of community (including
as a subset customer and prospect) communication and interaction.
Of all these communities, it turns out the most interesting in the
short term will be those on the "Intranet," communities at work
(although not exclusively communities of work--there will be social
interest group interactions as well)."
Source: Geoffrey Moore, "
Business Planning in Record
Time,"
BBN Sounding Board,
1995
-
Whats
the hottest issue facing IT professionals in 1996? "If, when, and
how to develop a corporate intranet. The World Wide Web will become
the default interface for server-based applications. The adoption
of Web technology will be a user-driven movement similar to the
adoption of the PCs in the 1980s, and this will have a destabilizing
effect on IT departments and software vendors." Source: Paul Saffo,
(Director, Institute for the Future), Information Week,
January 8, 1996, p. 12
-
"Intranets
solve a fundamental problem for corporate information officers:
They allow data to be exchanged freely among everyone on the network,
regardless of whether employees use PCs, Macs, or workstations.
Up to now, almost every time a software application on a corporate
network was added or changed, engineers had to rearrange the company's
hardware and software setup. But the network designed with Internet
tools begins to resemble a phone network, whose system managers
don't have to think about the kinds of conversations being conducted.
... Intranets can also link users to the worldwide Internet."
Source: David Kirkpatrick, "
Riding
the Real Trends in Technology,"
Fortune, February 19,
1996, p. 57
-
"No-one
seems to know who started the trend, but small and large companies
around the world are quickly joining the move towards using the
Internet as a local and wide area network. Rather than have remote
users access a network through a long distance connection, companies
are setting up secure and password protected World Wide Web sites
which can be accessed through the Internet. By dialing into the
Internet from any local access number, a user can assess the content
available to everyone else in a company network. Christopher Locke,
an Internet veteran from Mecklermedia, MCI Network, and currently
with IBM, spoke to Newsbytes about the growing trend of the intranet
and the need for corporations to 'adopt the openness which characterizes
the global network' called the Internet. Said Locke, 'There has
been too much focus on How do we turn the Internet into TV? or How
do we make it into another selling device? These are all the wrong
attempts. The companies which are going to define success on the
Internet are the ones that are ready to move to a new business model.
... The entire work scene is changing, claims Locke. 'We are looking
at the end of jobs as we know them. Companies are using teams which
consists of groups, separate employees, outside contractors, and
business partners. This trend calls for a means of open communication.
Sure, a company will always have its secrets, but the Internet,
and now the intranet, allow a company to open its doors for less
restricted communication between teams, employees, and eventually
the general public.'"
Source: Patrick McKenna, "Internet Expo - Intranet
Hot Topic At Show," Newsbytes News Network article, February 21,
1996
-
"Move
over Internet and type in Intranet. O'Reilly & Associates' latest
study shows businesses are using the Internet more for internal
user rather than public access and while acceptance of the Internet
as a business tool is growing, caution is the word of the day. Simply
put, Intranet is a World Wide Web site which is used strictly for
a company's internal use. As opposed to a local area network commonly
used by businesses, Intranet allows uniform remote access and takes
advantage of a growing set of Internet applications based on text,
video, audio, database and other standards."
Source: "Businesses Choose Intranet Over Internet," Newsbytes News
Network, March 15, 1996
-
"Connie
Deletis thinks he knows a paradigm shift when he feels one. And
right now the vice president of IS at National Semiconductor Corp.
is about neck deep in one that has all the power of a rip tide.
The driving force? The nearly universal demand among his users for
access to internal corporate data, documents, and applications over
the Internet. 'This represents a fundamental shift in the way we
manage and distribute information to people both inside and outside
the company,' says Deletis. 'We in IS are trying to stay out in
front of this, but sometimes it feels like we're getting dragged
under.' ... Many companies today are making Internet access a standard
business tool, alongside telephones. Drug maker Eli Lilly and Co.,
for example, is spending upward of $600,000 annually to equip virtually
all of its 26,000 employees with Internet accounts and software
by the middle of next year and to develop intranet applications.
One provides researchers across the company with the immediate access
to the last four years' worth of research papers on diabetes. Bell
Atlantic, with 20,000 Web browser-enabled users today, plans to
have 40,000 by the end of the year. 'In the future, we see the Internet
and the Web becoming the standard communication approach for the
company,'says Bell Atlantic CIO Ralph Szygenda."
Source: Jeff Moad, "
Web's New Spin,"
PC Week, March 11, 1996
-
"Information
is power, George Orwell reminded us, and intranets enable you to
empower individuals and distribute information quickly and reliably
throughout your company. From customer-tracking information to discussion
about the newest products, corporate directories to debates on strategic
direction, and personnel and policy guides to business and financial
wire news, the information and ideas that today are poorly distributed
within your organization can become an integral part of your intranet."
Source:
Dave Taylor, "What's
an intranet? Ways you can spin an internal Web site,"
InfoWorld, April 4, 1996