Communication sans frontiers

Our shrinking electronic world will alter in ways that are only dimly imaginable, changing set ideas about where people work and what kind of work they do, concepts of national borders and sovereignty, and patterns of international trade. Ajay Gidh outlines some future scenarios that seamless information exchange may bring to our lives

The eclipse of the distance barrier is only one of the astonishing changes taking place as communications and computers are combined in new ways. Fibre-optic networks and digital compression will allow many families to receive personalised television channels. The most important question deals with how our world will change as a result of the communications revolution. The death of distance loosens the grip of geography. Companies will have more freedom to locate a service where it can be best produced, rather than near its market. People—some at least—will gain more freedom to live far from their employers. Some kind of work will be organised in three shifts based on world’s three main time zones: the Americas, East Asia / Australia, and Europe. Time zones and language groups rather than mileage will come to define distance.

Barriers and borders will break down. The horizontal bonds among people doing the same job or speaking the same language in different parts of world will grow stronger. Some of the society’s vertical bonds—between government and the governed, or bosses and workers—will grow weaker.

Here are some of the most important developments to watch, thanks to the revolution in communication technologies:

• The fate of location: No longer will location be key to most business decisions. Companies will locate any screen-based activity anywhere on earth, wherever they can find the best bargain of skill and productivity. Developing countries will increasingly perform on-line services—monitoring, security screens, running helplines and call centres, writing software, and so forth—and sell them to the rich industrial countries that generally produce such services domestically.
• The irrelevance of size: Small companies will offer services that in the past only giants had the scale and scope to provide. Individuals with valuable ideas, initiatives, and strong business plans will attract global venture capital and convert their ideas into valuable businesses.
• Improved connections: Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband—‘switched’, like the telephone, and used to contact other subscribers; ‘interactive’ in that, unlike broadcast TV, all ends of the network can communicate; and ‘broad-band’, with the capacity to receive TV-quality motion pictures. While the Internet will continue to exist in its present form, it will also be integrated into other services, such as the telephone and television.
• Customised content: Improved networks will also allow individuals to order ‘content for one’; that is, individual customers will receive or send exactly what they want to receive (or send), when, and where they want it.
• A deluge of information: Our capacity to absorb new information will not increase, so we will need filters to sift, process, and edit it. Companies will have greater need for boosters—new techniques to brand and push their information ahead of competition.
• Increased value of brands: What’s hot—whether a product, a personality, a sporting event, or the latest financial data—will attract greater rewards. The cost of producing or promoting these commodities will not change, but the potential market will increase greatly. That will create a category of super-rich individuals.
• Increased value in niches: The power of the computer to search, identify, and classify people according to similar needs and tastes will create sustainable markets for many niche products. Niche players will increase, as will consumers demand for customised goods and services.
• Communities of practice: The horizontal bonds among people performing the same job or speaking the same language in different parts of the world will strengthen. Common interests, experience, and pursuits, rather than proximity, will bind these communities together.
• Near-frictionless markets: Many more companies and customers will have access to accurate price information. That will curtail excessive profits, enhance competition, and help to curb inflation, resulting in ‘profitless prosperity’; it will be easier to find buyers, but hard to make fat margins.
• Increased mobility: Every form of communication will be available for mobile or remote use. While fixed connections such as cable will offer greater capacity and speed, wireless will be used not just to send a signal over a large region but to carry it from a fixed point to users in a relatively small radius. Satellite transmission will allow people to use a single mobile telephone anywhere, and the distinctions between fixed and mobile receiving equipment (a telephone or personal computer) will blur.
• Increased global reach, greater local provision: While small companies find it easier to reach markets around the world, big companies will more readily offer high-quality local services, such as putting customers in one part of the world directly in touch with expertise in other places, and monitoring more precisely the quality of local provision.
• The loose-knit corporation: Culture and communication networks, rather than rigid management structures, will hold companies together. Many companies will become networks of independent specialists; more employees will therefore work in smaller units or alone. Loyalty, trust, and open communications will reshape the nature of customer and supplier contracts; a supplier will draw directly on information held in a database of their customers, working as closely and seamlessly as an in-house supplier now does. Technologies like electronic mail and computerised billing will reduce the cost of dealing with customers and suppliers.
• More minnows, more giants: On one hand, the cost of starting new business will decline, and companies will be able to offer services more easily, which means that more small companies will spring up. On the other hand, communication amplifies the strength of brands and the power of networks. In industries where networks matter, concentration may increase, but often in the form of loose global associations under a banner of brands or quality guarantees.
• The inversion of home and office: As more people work from home or from small, purpose-built offices, the line between work and home will blur. The office will become a place for the social aspects of work such as celebrating, networking, lunching and gossiping. Home design will also change, and the domestic office will become a regular part of the house.
• The proliferation of ideas: New ideas and information will travel faster to the remotest corners of the world. Devloping countries will have access to knowledge that the industrial world has long enjoyed. Communities of practice and long-distance education programmes will help people to find mentors and acquire new skills.
• A new trust: Since it will be easier to check whether people and companies deliver what they have promised, many services will become more reliable and people will be more likely to trust each other to keep their word. However, those who fail to deliver will quickly lose that trust, which will become more difficult to regain.
• People as the ultimate scarce resource: The key challenge for companies will be to hire and retain good people, extracting value from them, rather than allowing them to keep all the value they create for themselves. A company will constantly need to convince its best employees that working for it enhances each individual’s value.
• Loss of privacy: Like the rural societies of the past, protecting privacy will be difficult. Government and companies will easily monitor people’s movements. Machines will recognise physical attributes like a voice or fingerprints. Civil libertarians will worry but others will accept this loss as a fair exchange for the reduction of crime, including fraud and illegal immigration. In the electronic world, there will be no privacy.
• Redistribution of wages: Low-wage competition will reduce the earning power of many people in rich countries employed in routine screen-based tasks, but the premium for certain skills will grow. People with skills that are in demand will earn broadly similar amounts wherever they live in the world. So income difference within countries will grow; and income difference between countries will narrow.
• No more emigration: Poor countries with good communications technology will be able to retain their skilled workers, who will be less likely to emigrate to countries with higher cost of living if they can earn rich-world wages and pay poor-world prices for everyday necessities right at home. Thus inexpensive communications may reduce some of the pressure to emigrate.
• Rebirth of Cities: As individuals spend less time in the office and more time working from home or travelling, cities will transform from concentrations of office employment to centres of entertainment and culture; that is, cities will become places where people stay in hotels, visit museums and galleries, dine in restaurants, participate in civic events, and attend live performances of all kinds. In contrast, poor countries will stem the flight from countryside to cities by using low-cost communication to provide rural dwellers with better medical services, jobs, education, and entertainment.
• The rise of English: The global role of English as second language will strengthen as it becomes the common standard for communication in business and commerce. Many more countries, especially in the developing world, will therefore adopt English as a subsidiary language. It will be as important to learn English as to use software that is compatible with the near-universal MS-DOS.
• Rebalance of political power: Since people will communicate their views on government more directly, rulers and representatives will become more sensitive ( and perhaps, more responsive) to lobbying and public-opinion polls, especially in established democracies. Many people worry about the electronic future. They see the prospect of many jobs destroyed and a few sets of skills disproportionately rewarded. They worry about society’s increasing vulnerability to technological breakdown and computer crime. The more society relies on technology, many argue, the bigger the problem when something goes wrong and computer systems are hacked into or go haywire But many of these worries already apply to the non-electronic world.

This electronic revolution about opportunity and about increasing human contact. It will be easier than ever before for people with initiative and ideas to turn them into business ventures. It will be easier to discover information, to learn new things, and acquire new skills.

(The author is managing partner, Retail Solutions Division- professional services for South East Asia at NCR.He can be contacted at ajay.gidh@ncr.com)