Digital Work CyberTrends
Professor John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Additions to this document since November 6, 1997 are preceded with the 
icon.
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.
- "Information technology is poised to alter the scope of human intercourse ... the new technology holds the potential to change human settlement patterns, change the way people interact with each other, change our ideas of what it means to be human. Information technology will have the power to reverse what may have been an aberration in human history: the industrial model of society. While people in agrarian societies had for milleniums worked the land around their homes to the rhythm of the sun, industrialization created the time clock and the separate workplace. Wired technology already is assaulting the industrial concept of the workday; as technology brings greater realism to electronic communications, the work-place for many will become untethered from geography, letting people live anywhere. ... Wired technology will obliterate the significance of two of the great symbols of the Industrial Revolution, the train and the clock, and along with them the idea that society can organize everything to run on set schedules. The temporal shift this technology permits -- even demands -- is likely to be its most profound and enduring effect. With an economy that straddles many time zones, the nine-to-five workday will disappear for those for whom it hasn't already. People will become accustomed to flitting between their different roles of work, recreation, and repose, constantly prey to interruption, even addicted to it."
Source: Andrew Kupfer, "Alone Together," Fortune, March 20, 1995, pp. 94-104.
- “Knowledge workers, selling their labor to new species of business that will flourish in the wired economy, may need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. ... Professor Thomas Malone of the Center for Coordination Science at MIT says such wired workers will form ‘overnight armies of intellectual mercenaries.’ Imagine a company with a task that needs urgent attention -- say, designing a lawnmower or writing a computer program. The company might not maintain a cadre within its ranks to do the job. Instead, it trolls the net for talent, sending out a bulletin that describes the tasks to be done and the skills required of team members. The notice might go directly to qualified applicants, based on resumes filed online. Specialists anywhere in the world instantly submit bids to do a piece of the job, simultaneously triggering a query to their personal references. Winning bidders work together via video hookup, each at his or her home base. The project might last a few weeks or a few days or a few hours. Afterwards the team disbands and the members melt back into the talent pool to bid on new jobs.”
Source: Andrew Kupfer, "Alone Together," Fortune, March 20, 1995, p. 99
- "The client-server revolution sweeping corporate America has made it easier for Jan Spitzer and Diane Boyd to participate in another revolution: job sharing. The distributed computing environment -- where workers can be located anywhere and anyplace -- is ideally suited for allowing two people to split one job. ‘Information technology is the means by which people can liberate themselves from the old rat race,’ say Harris Sussman, president of Workways, a Cambridge, Mass. employment consulting firm. ... Experts say that emerging client-server technologies such as groupware, schedulers, and desktop videoconferencing will help them and other job sharers execute their assignments more easily. ... Groupware also allows job-sharing partners to collaborate without having to spend too much time updating each other abut who needs to do what. ‘The work efforts of one individual do not reside in the brain of that individual,’ note Kathleen Cook, group manager for Notes marketing communications at Lotus Development Corp. Workway’s Sussman maintains that client-server technology makes job sharing a flexible work alternative. ‘Job sharing doesn’t have to be co-located in a single facility,’ she says. ‘There’s no reason why somebody in India and someone in Iowa can’t share the same job.’ In many respects, client-server computing helps companies create virtual corporations. ‘The technology is helping us reorient our thinking,’ Sussman says. ‘It’s not useful to talk about job sharing anymore. What we’re really talking about is work sharing.”
Source: Eric R. Chabrow, “Technology Now Lets People Share Jobs,” Informationweek, March 13, 1995, p. 66.
- "Sometime last year, towards the end of a late-night management conference call, I casually announced to my colleagues that my family and I would be selling everything we owned and sailing around most the globe for at least a couple of years and probably longer. After a long pause, someone asked, 'You're not quitting work . . . are you?' 'No, I'll work from the boat. I'll be able to do most of what I do now.'"
Source: Lindsay McRory, "Fading Out," Outside Online, September 6, 1995
- "Hence, the much prophesied ``office of the future'' is finally taking
shape. From Manhattan towers to Silicon Valley tilt-ups, from
behemoths, such as Mobil, IBM, and Procter & Gamble, to tiny
startups, business is embracing new office designs for the 21st
century. Privacy is being replaced with productivity, hierarchy with
teamwork, and status with mobility. Work anywhere, anytime is the new paradigm. Your car, your
home, your office, even your client's office. Work alone, coupled,
teamed. Work in real space or in cyberspace. It amounts to a
massive disaggregation of work, spinning outside the walls and
confines of the traditional office. If the office of the future is a bit tardy in making its appearance, it's
because technology is just catching up with economic trends. That
``seamless'' web of voice, fax, and phone is only now making
teamwork and mobility a reality. And it took business time to grow
comfortable with tools such as voice mail and E-mail, the World
Wide Web and private ``intranets'' that link far-flung workers. Corporations are putting their money into computer networks and
other technologies that can boost efficiency and effectiveness, while
cutting back on bricks and mortar. At many companies, says Lalli,
technology is already surpassing facilities and real estate as the
second-biggest corporate operating expense, after salaries and
benefits."
Source: Joan O'C. Hamilton, "The New Workplace," Business Week, April 29, 1996
- "America has leapt headlong into the information age, and our careers will never be the same. 'We are in the midst of a historical transition in the way work is organized and carried out,' says Thomas Malone, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. As technology allows companies to accomplish more with fewer people -- and as it transforms the way work happens in virtually every discipline -- millions of people will find themselves working for 'one-person companies,' he says. Many who are cut loose will literally strike out on their own. But even those with full-time jobs will increasingly be lone rangers within their companies, traveling from one project to the next, working alone and in virtual teams, rarely settling into one long-term position. At no time in modern history have so many workers been so totally reliant on their own wits and resources to thrive."
Source: Amy Saltzman, "You, Inc.," U.S. News & World Report, October 28, 1996
- "We believe that cyberspace technology will be a primary driver toward new corporate architectures. The technology will enable multidimensional, professional interaction and natural, intuitive work group formation. The technology will evolve to provide enterprises with what we call Corporate Virtual Workspaces (CVWs) as highly productive replacements for current work environments. CVWs will be a key factor in the economic success of corporations in the next century. Indeed, CVWs will begin to profoundly change the character of corporations, society, and our economic system. ... Each worker will attach his Personal Virtual Workspace (PVW) to his current employer's CVW. His PVW, analogous to the physical cubicle he inhabited back in the old days, provides a personal working environment rich in tools he has developed and collected over the years. These tools greatly extend his productivity, communication skills, and access to knowledge. ... The PVW will become a cyberspace worker's most valuable economic asset. His or her career and experience will be reflected in their PVW. More than a personal workspace, each PVW will house a cyberspace worker's accumulated personal tools, references, and productivity artifacts. Indeed, the value of a new prospective team member will be measured by the richness of his PVW in addition to the knowledge and experience he has garnered on past projects."
Source: Steve Pruitt and Tom Barrett, "Corporate Virtual Workspace," Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (Editor), MIT Press, 1992, pp. 383-409
- "The Personal Memex (PM) will be a storage accessory, portable and connectable to Dynapaper or other individual workstations or to a network, for the storage or retrieval of documents from electronic publishing systems. The material would be stored in a hypertext format, with some links provided automatically and some created by the reader. Individuals would fill PMs by adding whatever documents they found interesting or important, defining links to already-stored documents, and adding new linkages as new relationships become evident or relevant. These PMs would be large enough to contain the documents selected over a number of years, and so would become a repository for the knowledge deemed important by the individual over his educational or professional career, organized in his own way and restructured as his own perceptions and understandings evolve. Each individual would have the opportunity to build his own personal library. ... Any item in that file would be accessible at any time from a personal workstation or Dynapaper. ... As the printing press made it possible for everyone to have his own books, the Personal Memex will make it possible for everyone to build his own vast library and to access each element with the facility of a professional library staff."
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. 237
- "Most technical advances lead to only minor improvement in products and slight changes in the organization of work. A modified condenser might boost the power of a steam locomotive, but it wouldn’t radically affect the work of the train’s crew or fundamentally alter the economic role of railroads. But, in rare cases, an especially potent new technology will trigger a restructuring that ripples throughout the entire economy -- from the lowliest work cells to the largest organizations. Today, as the twentieth century draws to a close, we are in the midst of precisely this kind of massive structural transformation. Because we lack the benefit of hindsight, we cannot fully appreciate the magnitude of the economic restructuring we are now experiencing. But our descendants will almost certainly judge the ‘computer-on-a-chip’ to be the most economically significant technical achievement of the previous 500 years. The microprocessor will rank at the very pinnacle of human invention because -- like the printing press -- it slashed the cost of encoding, copying, and communicating information. And, by doing so, it has brought vast areas of previously unattainable knowledge within human grasp and has made possible a staggering array of new products. Today these products are profoundly altering the capabilities of millions of work cells in every niche of the global economy. ... By delivering on the promise of computer technology, the microprocessor thrust the world’s capitalist economies into a new economic era -- the Information Age. Robert Noyce, coinventor of the integrated circuit and a founder of Intel Corporation, wrote: ‘Just as the Industrial Revolution enabled man to apply and control greater physical power than his own muscle could provide, so electronics has extended his intellectual power. ... As millions of microprocessors flooded into the economy, it was as if the information-processing power of each work cell’s nucleus was abruptly and immensely multiplied. With their newly acquired personal computers, front-line managers began exercising a level of control that was previously unimaginable. Production cells that had always depended upon instructions from remote headquarters cells suddenly were empowered with enough information-processing capacity to make fast, rational decisions on their own. In short, microprocessor technology radically boosted the productive potential of every work cell in the economy. In a turbulent decade, with little conscious awareness of the fundamental forces at play, and without any plan, the economy spontaneously restructured itself in what amounted to an unsung American perestroika."
Source: Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, Henry Holt and Company, 1990, pp. 99-105
- "'We estimate 40,000 of today’s AT&T jobs will go away.’ says Harold W. Burlingame, AT&T’s human resources chief. ‘All those jobs are going away.’"
Source: John J. Keller, “AT&T Tries to Put New Spin on Big Job Cuts,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1996, p. B1
- “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 couldn’t 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 tomorrow’s 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. ... Today’s 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 band’s 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
- "We are moving into a world in which for many the job may no longer be the primary source of income.
We are moving into a world in which the faster the rate of change, the more complex the society, the
more information must be generated, stored and transformed into knowledge, the more information must
be exchanged and the more competitive the global economy becomes. We are creating an economy with
less and less room for uneducated or less skilled workers. Indeed, even highly skilled workers can have
the wrong skills at the wrong place at the right time and find themselves vulnerable. We may be moving
from a economy based on employment to one in which we do not have employees but have in fact
"entreployees", some cross between entrepreneur and employee."
Source: Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock in the Present Tense," Aspen Summit '96, The Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1996
- "Information and communication technologies are the critical new lubricant. Many services, especially financial and anything involving software, consist of nothing but information and can be moved by wire alone. Moving solid goods still requires cheap transportation, too, but the cost of hauling things around deeps dropping, energy cost notwithstanding. And many of the products being hauled -- everything from cameras to cars -- keep getting smaller and lighter as they get electronically smarter. Once a manager in Detroit learns how to use the telecosm to outsource to Toledo, Ohio, she can outsource to Toledo, Spain; with cyber power all physical distances are roughly the same. And with this kind of global production system in place, a manufacturing company can move jobs and capital around like pieces of a chessboard, shopping continually for the best-priced labor -- and the best labor laws. As Norman Macrae, former deputy editor of the Economist, foresaw some years ago, corporations of the future are not going to be nationally based, and they ‘aren’t going to have long-lasting lines of production in settled places.’ Their managers will be able to move jobs almost as fast as governments can rewrite employment laws. At the margin, the managers of these transnational companies will adjust their portfolios of labor in much the same way as the manager of the Templeton Growth Fund trades stock."
Source: Peter Huber, “Cyberpower,” Forbes, December 2, 1996, p. 145
- "Computers cannot replace human beings. But a computer, plus communications, can replace an entire department very
easily. Departments are easy to replace. A department of anything. For instance, you can't replace a reporter with a
computer. Can't be done. But you can, by shipping in your news from somewhere else, duplicating stories from a national
magazine, eliminate the need for reporters all together."
Source: Arno Penzia (head of AT&T Bell Labs), interviewed by Peter Leyden in "On the Edge of the Digital Age," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, 1995
- "Most work will be done by project teams. ... Networks of bits and pieces of companies will come together to exploit a market opportunity, perhaps stay together for a couple of years, then dissolve never to exist again in the same form. ... 'Extended family' project management. Effectively using e-mail and varous other direct electronic links enables project teams to include many who are far from 'home' -- e.g. Boeing and its Japanese partners designing aircraft together. A project/network can readily include, real-time: members of the firm throughout the world, suppliers, distributors, customers, and special resources (at univeristies and think tanks, for instnace). Through the use of various groupware and other problem-solving tools, the project management/brainstorming/idea generation/social integration process is changed forever. ... If there is a single theme--from the worker's perspective--that emerges in analyzing McKinsey (and EDS, CNN, Tiuteflex, UPRR, MCI, and Quad/Graphics), it's the idea of 'create your own firm.' It's up to you to take the initiative, start projects, seek out customers, build your own network. ... Most of tomorrow's work will be done in project teams. Project teams will neither quash individualism nor blunt specialization. To the contrary, individual contributions will be more important than ever. Becoming expert--and enhancing your expertise--will be imperative for almost all of us. ... The lifespan of a project team can be life (very unlikely), or just a few hours (not so unlikely). Dynamic, short-lived project configurations will be commonplace. ... Arguably, project work was the norm before the industrial revolution. Most activities took place in small, independent shops, and craft and crafsmen were the economy's centerpiece. The industrial revolution changed all that. Skills and tasks were narrowed. And narrowed again. Thousands of people went to work under the same roof. Now, thanks to new competitive pressures, new distributive information technologies and the like, we are, arguably, returning to the craft tradition. The essence of craft is the project. It may turn out that the 150 years from the time of Dickens to 1980 will have been the anomaly. What's normal, on the job or off, will end up being craft, learning, adding value -- i.e., the project"
Source: Tom Peters, Liberation Management, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
- "You've no future unless you add value, create projects."
Source: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor, quoted by Tom Peters, Liberation Management, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 216
- "Communications in a network are absolutely incompatible with a strict, parochial hierarchy. If executive behavior wars with the ways of the net, the net wins because it is faster and more accurate. You either kill it, or it wins."
Source: Hellene Runtagh, CEO of GE Information Services, quoted by Thomas A Stewart, "Managing in a Wired Company," Fortune, July 11, 1994, p. 50
- "All hierarchies, monopolies, pyramids
and powergrids of industrial society will
fall.
Heterarchy will prevail. The chip is a
centrifuge at the center of the world
economy. Power will migrate to the
individuals who are already the chief
source of value. Artificial agglomerations
of talent will tend to dissolve into their
component minds. "
Source: George Gilder, "Telecosm: A Live Interview with George Gilder," 21st Century Online
- "I wouldn't categorically say that companies structured the old way can't survive, but it's hard to see them thriving. Anything that can be done in the vertical way can be done more cheaply by collections of specialist companies organized horizontally."
Source: Andy Grove, "How Intel Makes Spending Pay Off," Fortune, Feburary 22, 1993, p. 58.
- “Business spent $3 billion dollars on multimedia in 1994 and, according to Dataquest, that spending is on a steady incline -- at a breakneck pace of 32% per year. The result: Multimedia is rapidly marching onto corporate computer networks, in the form of desktop videoconferencing, large-scale image archives, and voice-over-data-networks systems.”
Source: Carol Wilson, “Multimedia Drives Tomorrow’s Network Systems,” Inter@active Week, March 27, 1995, p. 34.
- "According to Eric Benhamou, Chairman of the American Electronics Association task force on the NII and President of 3COM Corporation, 'The NII should not be built to deliver 500 channels to every home. Rather, business competitiveness and business efficiency are truyl the prinicple reasons we should build the NII."
Source: John Rendleman, "Study Reflects Support for NII," CommunicationsWeek, March 14,1994
- "Free Western land was the most significant thing about the
American frontier ---`a gift of capital that enabled people to
set themselves up as farmers, gold miners, and merchants at a
fraction of the cost back East or in Europe. On the electronic
frontier, the capital you need to stake your claim is trivial.
And the free land never ends. Inside your gateway you can create
as big a spread -- as big a business -- as you please. ... The high cost of dealing across company boundaries has been a powerful spur to vertical integration. As transaction costs
fall, says John Hagel III, a partner at McKinsey and Company,
'we are going to see a wide spread disintegration of US business
and the emergence of very different corporate entities.' ... In a fully electronic environment, the entire value chain might be dismantled and reformed. ... The remaking of the value chain
means a shift in power to small business. ... When a digital
highway circles the globe, the fellow who builds the better mousetrap
will find that the path to his door already exists. Says Stanford economist Brian Author: 'The US is perfectly suited for this kind of economy. It calls for a lone-wolf type --- Steve McQueen and James Coburn.'"
Source: Thomas A. Stewart, "Boom Time on the New Frontier,"
Fortune Information Technology Special Report, Autumn 1993, p. 153
- "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 can’t 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 won’t 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. That’s 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 won’t 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
- "ONE AFTER ANOTHER, the instant millionaires and even billionaires have been appearing, brought forth by the stock market's magic.
Last Aug. 9, Netscape, a Mountain View, California, software company, sold stock to the public for the first time. By the end of the
day, the shares owned by chairman James Clark were worth $566 million. Netscape's technical whiz, Marc Andreessen, who is 24 years old, was suddenly worth $58 million. In November the net worth of Pixar chairman Steve Jobs increased more than $1.1 billion in a single day when the company, responsible for the computer-animated hit movie Toy Story, sold new stock on the open market. Dozens of other entrepreneurs have had similar experiences during the past year. Getting rich quick is one thing; these are cases of getting incredibly rich immediately. ... 'I don't think there was ever a period when wealth was created so instantly through the market as it is today,' says Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University. 'Certainly there were many people who rose from modest wealth to vast riches over a lifetime at the turn of the century--specifically, those in railroads, steel, oil and the big, rapidly growing industries of the time. But it was nothing like the people today who are worth a few hundred thousand dollars one day and take their companies public the next and become billionaires.'
Source: James Collins, "High Stake Winners," Time, February 19, 1996
- "What we're going to see over the coming two decades is the devolution of many large corporations," says Peter Schwartz, president of Global Business Network, a cyber-age research and consulting firm. Case in point: IBM. In the same massive restructuring that is bringing virtual offices and high-tech gadgetry to every level of its business, Big Blue has slashed its work force by more than 170,000 jobs since its employment peak in the late 1980s. Many of these erstwhile employees have set up shop on their own, often doing business on a contract basis for IBM itself. Thoroughly armed with the modern weaponry of the road warrior, they, like the telecommuters at Chiat/Day, are among the forerunners of employment in the information age."
Source: "The Age of the 'Road Warrior,'" Time, Special Issue Spring 1995, Vol. 145, No. 12
- "Large companies have cut 3 million jobs since 1989, enough to create a blue- and white-collar army of angry, passionate, unpredictable voters."
Source: Del Jones, "Laid-off Voters Rethink Loyalties and Priorities," USA Today, March 13, 1996, p. B1
- "The telecom industry is as good an example as any of the kind of profound change the American economy is currently undergoing. There is globalization at work, as equipment that was once routinely made in the U.S. is now manufactured in places like Malaysia. The supremacy of the knowledge worker--the person who can figure out how to make a phone line work like a cable line, say--is apparent, as is the emergence of technology that can replace such formerly irreplaceable humans as phone operators. Then there's the need to eliminate bureaucracies that clog corporate arteries; the increased competition; and the cataclysmic effect of deregulation, which will clearly transform this thing we call telecommunications in ways we can't even imagine right now. In such an environment, big, slow-moving bureaucratic companies like AT&T aren't 800-pound gorillas. They're sitting ducks."
Source: Joseph Nocera, "Living With Layoffs," Fortune, April 1, 1996
- "The big companies have no future. Look, in the last 15 years, the world over, there has been practically no growth in big companies. There are few exceptions - a few information companies. ... By and large, there are no more advantages to big business. There are only disadvantages. Big companies had three advantages, and they are all gone. The first was they could get transnational or international money that a medium-sized company could not. Now everyone can. Number Two is information. It used to be that nobody had any information. But as you go more international, as the economy becomes more global, the access to good information becomes crucial. If you are a medium-sized company, then the CEO still knows every customer and still knows the industry. You can't know that in the US$10 billion company; you get reports. Reports tell you what your subordinates want you to know. The last and most important factor is that young, educated people do not want to work in the big institutions. That's true even in Japan today."
Source: Peter Drucker, interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly, "The Relentless Contrarian," Wired, August 1996, p. 119.
- "Because of network and related technologies, we're going to see wealth redistribution on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. You can talk about wealth redistribution at a variety of levels. Here's one example: From 1985 to 1990, we saw a huge redistribution of shareholder value between companies that were owners of proprietory architectures and those that were championing open architectures. Something like US$50 billion worth of shareholder value was destroyed by companies that owned the old proprietory-style technology. But in just a five-year period, a new set of players advocating open systems created about $35 billion in value. The other five went to the customers."
Source: John Hagel, author of Net Gain, quoted by Kevin Kelly, "It Takes a Village to Make a Mall," Wired, August 1997, p. 84
- "America’s smaller governments are flexing their muscles; and devolution, which used to mean the shifting of power to the states, now increasingly means the shifting of power to cities and townships too.
Throughout the 1990s, the lower and more local levels of government have won increasing importance ... Whatever else devolution means, it does not mean quantitatively less government.
Source: "More Neighbourly Government," Economist web site, January 3-9, 1998>
- "The music studio of the future is just a computer. You'll do it all in software. ... The control that these bigger entities (corporate-funded record companies) have been able to exert on musicians is disintegrating. Now, if you could just get around distribution, which the major labels control, you could completely democratize the production and distribution of music. ... Why shouldn't the creation of music be part of everyone's life?"
Source: Michael Goldberg, "Consume the Minimum, Produce the Maximum," Wired, December 1994.
-
“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,” Inter@ctive Week, 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,” Inter@ctive Week, March 27, 1995, p. 22.
- “What’s to stop artists from making and selling their own product, without labels? What’s 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! Anything’s possible in today’s 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.
- "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, don’t-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
- "When the senior executives at Young &Rubicam Inc. wanted to pitch the services of the New York-based marketing communications enterprise to potential clients in Geneva; Hong Kong; Singapore; and Sydney, Australia, they did it over a
multipoint videconferencing system. The same technology let top managers in New York make an advertising campaign presentation to a client as agency creative directors in Australia and Toronto offered their suggestions in real time. Videoconferencing has changed the way Young & Rubicam, the world's sixth-largest marketing communications enterprise, conducts its business. The company maintains nine videoconferencing systems: four in New York and one each in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Chicago; London; Paris; and San Francisco with an eye on installing similar systems in Frankfurt, Singapore and Sydney. ... Young & Rubicam has used videoconferencing to replace costly travel to far-off destinations. In the past, for instance, company representatives would make weekly or biweekly trips to bring clients up to date on their accounts. Today, a one-hour videoconference provides the clients with the same details."
Source: Eric R. Chabrow, "A Case for Global Videoconferencing," Communications Week, March 29, 1995
- "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
- "Farallon Computing, Inc., today announced its strategy to revolutionize the
way people use the Internet and to increase user productivity by
introducing the first Internet applets to offer real-time,
person-to-person file transfer and collaboration over the Internet. 'We want to expand the Internet's use beyond WWW browsing and email transfer, for real-time, person-to-person productivity,
collaboration, interactive conferencing, and user support,' said
Alan Lefkof, president and CEO. 'Our goal is to increase user
productivity by taking people to the next level of Internet
collaborative use. ... The first Windows 3.x and Windows 95 applet announced today is
Look@Me. Similar to the "observe" function in Timbuktu Pro, the
applet allows one Internet user to view the screen of another
Internet user. This enables colleagues to collaborate across the
Internet. For example, a distributor in London may watch the screen
of a vendor in San Francisco which displays a PowerPoint presentation
and be able to discuss the material via phone."
Source: "Farallon Revolutionizes the Way People Use the Internet," Business Wire article, March 6, 1996
- "The virtual office is more than a fantasy for the future, more than a few scattered trials involving a mere handful of workers, and certainly more than a fancy term for taking home work at day’s end. Instead, the virtual office -- made possible by new information technologies and innovative ideas about the office and the way people work -- is a reality now at hundreds of companies. ... What is the virtual office? One expert describes it as ‘a series of loosely coupled workplaces, including the home, office, remote offices, and hotel rooms.’ No matter how you define it, the payoff goes beyond real-estate savings. The technology used by virtual workers can be faster, better, and cheaper, and all signs indicate that more workers will be asked to stay away from the office. ... One of the biggest gains delivered by the virtual office is productivity. Virtual-office workers are 10% to 20% more productive than they would be in permanent offices, says Franklin Becker, director of international workplace studies at Cornell University. ... The biggest change wrought by the virtual office will more likely be cultural than technological. As Craig Mathias, principal of he FarPoint Group, says, ‘Work will be a thing you do, not a place you go to.’"
Source: Bruce Caldwell and Jill Gambon, "The Virtual Office Gets Real," InformationWeek, January 22, 1996, p.32
- "Despite advances in telecommunications, the standard white-collar organisational model is still one of local employees assembling daily in office buildings. Companies that adhere to this model are increasingly vulnerable to competition from “virtual ” corporations —low-overhead companies who exploit developments in networking, telecommunications, and workgroup software to source expertise worldwide and form and re-form on a project-by-project basis."
Source: Virtual Corporations
- "VeriFone, Inc. is an example of what being virtual is all about. All employees are close to their customer and there is no headquarters, or for that matter, a building. The workplace is where the employee is. The
technology that supports VeriFone's knowledge sharing consists of e-mail, on-line company information, a
24-hour on-line community, and network access from anywhere in the world. There are no paper memos
and no secretaries. VeriFone's central knowledge 'pump' is, 'Tell me what you are interested in and I will
bring it to you.'"
Source: Laurie W. Payne, "Unlocking an Organization's Ultimate Potential Through Knowledge Management," APQC InPractice Case Study," Knowledge Management inPractice, American Productivity and Quality Center
- "All enterprises share a common need to maintain an office force, thus office processes are one of the great frontiers on which improved services, costs, and quality can be developed by every business and public entity. ... Technology already available enables modern industry to disburse work from expensive offices, far from employee’s homes, into locations near or even in their homes. Most modern offices feature seas of workstations equipped with telephone and fax communications to customers (or clients), suppliers, and other functional departments of the company. Virtually every business transaction is entered or altered on the workstation computer and, indeed, many transactions are communicated between customers and suppliers via telecommunication links between computers, eliminating the need for manual transaction processing. Telecommunications networks can, just as readily, link individual computer workstations in employees’ homes to central processors as to workstations in the large office. Thus, the office building of the future, for many companies, may be no building at all."
Source: Roy L. Harmon, Reinventing the Business, The Free Press, 1996, p.9
- "We find that information technology permitted work to be carried out and coordinated wherever wires could be connected to a computer terminal --at home, at a customer's site, at a hotel, at a coffee shop, at
a vacation resort. So rather than establishing a place of work in an office building with preallocated square
footage of work area per employee, an alternative emerged where historic limitations of time and space
could be overcome by equipping the worker with a lap top computer and cellular phone.
Towards managing the virtual office, managers have to embrace a new view of organization boundaries.
One that revolves around the need to be as close to the customer as possible and where more than any
time before, performance is measured on satisfying the customer's requirements rather than those of
internal constituencies within the firm. In this context, boundaries now move away from their "physical"
representations such as factory walls, different colored uniforms and executive offices, to being defined
by the ability to communicate over electronic wires. This requires a very different approach to providing
organizational cohesion where managers must pay much more attention to aligning the different types of
boundaries in particular the social and economic ones."
Source: Richard L. Nolan, Hossam Galal, and Charles Tuller, "Virtual Offices: New Arrangements for Redefining Organization Boundaries,"Multimedia Colloquium 1995, Harvard Business School
- "Companies don't talk about ``work at home'' programs anymore;
they talk about ``WORK ANYWHERE, ANYTIME'' programs.
Laptops, fax machines, cellular phones, networks, E-mail, and
voice mail are making TELECOMMUTING a way of doing
business that satisfies strategic goals of spending more time with
customers and using commute time better. After all, does it matter
whether that critical voice-mail message you received was sent from
a client's office, an airport, or a traffic jam?"
Source: Joan O'C. Hamilton, "THE NEW WORKPLACE: Walls are falling as the `'office of
the future'' finally takes shape", Business Week, April 29, 1996
- "In the spring of 1993, on a ski slope in Telluride, Colorado, the godfather of the bunny that
keeps going had an epiphany. Jay Chiat, head of advertising agency Chiat/Day, started thinking
about "The Chrysalis Report," a strategic planning document delivered by his staff six months
before, and in particular, about its brief reference to the office of the future. Then he started
thinking that he was thinking about that in Telluride. A Zen moment.
The work at Chiat/Day, as virtually everywhere, is team-based. Private offices are used
mostly to make phone calls, use a computer, file things and be alone. But computers and
phones can now be anywhere, and solitude can be attained in less dedicated settings, Chiat
reasoned. What if going to the office was replaced by going to the team room? And what if the
team ream was temporary, ephemeral and partially in cyberspace?
Thus did Chiat become the champion of the "virtual office" -- the latest, and most heavily
hyped, revolution in workplace architecture for many years."
Source: Samuel B. Frank, "Reinventing the Architecture of Work," I.D., November 1994
- "Dan Clearwater is manager of Ernst & Young's service center and head of its "hoteling"
-- a practice where employees who spend most of their time out of the office don't
have a permanent desk. The center has office space for only about one-sixth of the
firm's traveling consultants and one-fourth of its client-based auditors ... Instead of a desk, E&Y hotelers have lockers. They can store pictures of family,
calendars and other personal desktop knickknacks. So when consultants and
auditors return, out come the favorite coffee mug and vacation photos.
At the San Francisco office of KPMG Peat Marwick LLP, hoteled staffers gained
laptop computers, increased file spaces, upgraded furniture and three staffers
available from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. to serve their needs in return for giving up their
desks.
'It was an education, but is now a part of the corporate culture since they've seen
how well it works,' said Peter Vogt, hoteling coordinator."
Source: Susan Smith, "Accountants adopt `hoteling' idea without
reservations," San Francisco Business Times, February 24, 1997
- "The virtual firm, work-where-you-live not
live-where-you-work option is about to become
reality. In the age of cellular and satellite
communications, the Internet, and wide-band,
high-speed telecommunications, the "office" may
no longer be relevant. Whether you're in Telluride
or Camden, all customers and all staff are, or
should be, considered truly equidistant."
Source: Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin, "The Changing Nature of Work," The Camden Conference on Telecommunications," October 24, 1997
- A soft factory is a new automation paradigm in which "softwareand computer networks have emerged as more important than production
machines, in which robots play a mere supporting role if they're
present at all, and in which human workers are back in unexpectd
force. Call it the digital factory, for its dependence on information
technology, or the soft factory, for its mix of the human and
the mechanical. ... Soft manufacturing is:
- allowing companies to customize products lliterally in quantities of one while churning them out at mass-production speeds,
- blurring the boundaries of the traditional factory by tying production ever closer to both suppliers and customers,
- weaving a fabric of highly automated microfactories across the American landscape."
The Motorala pager factory is one example of a soft factory.
The following phrases are being applied to this new manufacturing
paradigm:
- "We call this software-controlled continuous flow manufacturing."
- "We may be seeing the merger of a manufacturing plant with a retail store."
- "The computer has become more important than the production tool."
The seminal thinkers in manufacturing today are "coming out
of information sciences."
Networked personal computers are at the core of the soft factory:
"Linked in powerful networks, they open the way toward the
use of information technology as a great, unifying communicationtool -- a kind of superbrain hovering over the factory floor."
Source: Gene Bylinsky, "The Digital Factory," Fortune,
November 14, 1994, pp. 92-110.
- “In a word, manufacturing is dematerializing. We are witnessing, say Lehigh University professors Steven Goldman, Roger Nagel, and Kenneth Preiss, "the convergence of goods and services...It is forcing a reconceptualization of what we mean by the terms 'production' and 'product.'" Quite suddenly, distinctions between manufacturing and service have become about as meaningless as battlefield lines in a guerrilla war.”
Source: Thomas Stewart “A New 500 for the Economy,” Fortune, May 15, 1995, pp: 166-178
- "In an economy where knowledge is the key competitive resource, the chief task of management is to invent new, more effective ways of putting knowledge to work."
Source: Peter Drucker, "The New Society of Organizations," Harvard Business Review, October/November 1992
- "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, "Cyberspace 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
- "New technologies have made it possible to disaggregate, delegate, and manage work at much more decentralized and refined levels -- not only within an enterprise but across enterprises -- at a scale and scope never feasible before."
Source: James Brian Quinn, Intelligent Enterprise, Free Press, 1992
- "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.
- "As many as 450,000 bank jobs will disappear in the next five years and half of all U.S. bank branches will be gone over the next 10 years as customers turn to electronic transactions, according to a study by Deloitte & Touche. Instead of visiting branches, customers will bank from home over phone or through personal computers. ... Banks will shut branches and replace them with sales offices that cater to affluent consumers who are willing to pay for personal services."
Source: "Electronic Dealings Will Slash Bank Jobs, Branches, Study Finds," Wall Street Journal, August 14, 1995, p. B7a
- "U.S. Bancorp's UBank On-Sight is a monument to do-it-yourself banking. It's a place where customers can ... conjure up a live banker by poking their fingers at a video screen. The video banking system using a touch screen technology familiar to lottery players to give the customer information about banking services. One of the buttons generates a face-to-face interview with a representative of the bank. While the customer and the banker are talking, the customer can see both the bank officer and his or her own video image. The system uses video conferencing technology, called Proshare, developed by Intel Corp. The design lets a user see not only the faraway banker but also any document, such as an application for a new account. The document is live on both screens, so that, as the banker types in information, the customer can see the results immediately. At the end of the transaction, the customer recieves a copy of the document, printed out at the video banking site."
Source: Fran Gardner, "They're Banking on a New Gizmo," The Portland Oregonian, August 3, 1995, p. B1.
- Andersen has been working with its clients to identify new uses of videoconferencing tools. Their research indicated that “individual people, rather than businesses, are most receptive to the idea of interactive multimedia and most enjoy the possibilities it offers.” They are working with Intel to show firms the roles that Intel’s Proshare Video System can play in their businesses. One client is examining the possibility of creating a virtual branch bank model” which would have the following characteristics:
- It would be a stand-alone bank with mortgage advice, loan approval, and standard deposit and withdrawing capabilities.
- Videotapes would be used to help guide the customer through routine banking processes.
- Those services that require interaction with a real person would be achieved through live video.
There are many benefits to the bank:
- One person could appear in branches at one time.
- Highly trained experts could field dozens of questions per hour, as opposed to helping a few customers per hour in one branch.
- Fewer highly trained experts would be needed.
- A virtual branch is much less expensive than a “bricks and mortar” branch.
Source: Elizabeth Crane, "Seeing New Opportunities," Open Computing, March 1995, pp. 105-6.
- "If there is a single anatomical basis for modern civilization, it is the brain’s ability to convey its internal imagery to other brains through writing."
Source: Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, Henry Holt and Company, 1990, p. 164
- "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 PC’s, is 59 percent of all software sold. ... Over 80% of the world’s documents are now created with these applications."
Source: Bill Gates, "The Office of the Future," Fall 1995 Comdex Keynote Address, November 14, 1995
- "Intranet, the internal internet, that is the key information technology revolution for the remainder of this century. ... The Intranet is to 1995 what the 3270 PC products were to 1985: the beginning of a new means of doing business using computers. Ten years ago, the majority of networked devices were 3278 and 3279 character-mode terminals that had coaxial cable connections to large SNA networks. Most of these devices have since been replaced by personal computers and local area networks. The Intranet portends a similar revolution in information processing. There are several distinguishing features:
- Uses TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) for both wide-area and local-area transport of information,
- Uses HTML (hypertext markup language), SMTP (Simple mail transport protocol) and other open Internet-based standards as the means of moving information from clients to servers,
- Is completely owned by the corporation and not accessible from the Internet-at-large by the general public, and
- Is managed by IS with a similar set of tools, attitudes and procedures as they currently manage their legacy VTAM networks."
Source: David Strom, "Creating Private Intranets: Challenges and Prospects for IS"
- "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 -- they’re 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 company’s 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
- What’s 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
- "What's happening is technology has allowed us to unlock work from the physical office place. And the vision of office worker's heaven is that technology allows us to create the anytime/anyplace office; you don't have to be physically present in your office to do your work, you can work from home if you so choose or from somewhere else. ... The problem is that vision of Nirvana is only separated by the thinnest of tissues from what can only be described as knowledge worker hell. And that is, instead of the anytime/anyplace office, it's the everytime/ everyplace office where your information systems can hunt you down wherever you are. You can't escape them, and instead of home work there's really home overwork. ... the temptation to overwork is enormous. You have teams, so you're working with more people than ever, and you've got to talk to them at different times. Moreover, those teams are global, so you're working across time zones. And our research made it very clear, if you have more than a span of more than three time zones, you cannot do your job from nine to five. If it's 8:30 in the morning here in California, it's going to be 5:30, 6:30 in Stockholm, and you will have gotten up at about three in the morning to finish the meetings with folks in Tokyo, and you'll have a dinner conversation with friends in Europe before settling down and working on your west coast stuff."
Source: Paul Saffo, "Networking Forum: December 5," an interview published in the IBM Networking Forum.
- "We believe only four things for sure (until further notice): (1) There is ... clearly (dammit!) ... a whole new game of commerce ... life? ... somehow being created in Web/Net/cyberworld. It doesn't have much to do with the terra firma we grew up with (i.e., there ain't any firma); (2) We have got to be there ... now; (3) We have got to be there ... big; and (4) Usable content is all.
- I am betting my future on the Web.
- I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
- And that is the right attitude. (Gamble big, while knowing that no one knows anything for sure.)
A brand-new, totally weird (unless you're 15 or younger, in which case you get it) world is being born --- and metmorphosing weekly --- in cyberspace. This is not the time for wet toes. It is the time for wet thighs, wet necks, water in the mouth. Join in, big time, or ... "
Source: Tom Peters, "Taking the Plunge," Forbes ASAP, April 8, 1996, 119.
- "A new type of business is sprouting in hot spots of the global economy, places where the speed of
commerce is exceedingly fast and loose. In this world, companies do not respect traditional industry
paradigms and partitions. What they share is a tendency to upend business and industry models and to
redraw increasingly porous boundaries.
What we are seeing, in fact, is the end of industry. That's not to say that we now need to mourn the
dissolution of the airline industry or the cement industry. Rather, it means the end of industry as a useful
concept in contemplating business. The presumption that there are distinct, immutable businesses within
which players scramble for supremacy is a tired idea whose time is past. Traditional boundaries that
we've all taken for granted throughout our careers are blurring, and in many cases crumbling.
In place of industry, I suggest an alternative, more appropriate term: business ecosystem. Business
ecosystems span a variety of industries. Microsoft, for example, anchors an ecosystem that traverses at
least four major industries: personal computers, consumer electronics, information, and communications.
The Microsoft ecosystem also encompasses an extended web of suppliers including Intel and
Hewlett-Packard and myriad customers across market segments."
Source: James Moore, "The Death of Competition," Fortune, April 15, 1996
- "The growing importance of ecosystems brings along with it another major change: competition as we've
known it is dead. Not that competition is vanishing. In fact it is intensifying. But we need to think about it
differently. The traditional way to view competition is in terms of products and markets. Your product or
service goes up against that of your competitor, and one wins. That's still important, but this point of view
ignores the context--the environment--within which the business lies. Companies need to coevolve with
others in the environment, a process that involves cooperation as well as conflict. It takes generating
shared visions, forming alliances, negotiating deals, and managing complex relationships. The
announcements in March of overlapping alliances among AT&T, America Online, Microsoft, andNetscape (all of whom except AT&T have competing software products) to provide Internet services are
only the latest manifestation of this quickly emerging trend."
Source: James Moore, "The Death of Competition," Fortune, April 15, 1996
- "You have to bet on a future that is radically different from the present and past ... and drive your own organization, your industry, your customers and your marketplace toward entirely new definitions of themselves and their interdependencies."
Source: John R. Walter (President of AT&T and ex-CEO of R.R. Donnelley & Sons) quoted in "Why Did AT&T Choose John Walter?," Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1996, p. B1. This quote is taken from a speech at Washington University "No Place for Neutrality in the Digital Revolution," Center for the Study of American Business, CEO Series Issue No. 8, September 1996
- "Today we witness the dawn of yet another period of massive and comprehensive change, once again
facilitated by another kind of mobility which we term INTELLECTUAL MOBILITY. Computers, large
and small, software, networks, engineering and specialized services are now rapidly converging to enablealmost anyone anywhere to move their thoughts, knowledge and information, at the speed of light to
almost any other destination. The ramifications of this ability are simply staggering. Many facets of
commerce can now be digitized and innovated. At least two of the human senses, sight and hearing can
be stimulated to much greater degrees. Noise can be rapidly filtered to yield data; data can be correlated
into information; information can be reasoned into knowledge; and on those rare occasions, knowledge
can be transmitted into enlightenement. Goods, services and experiences can be customized and delivered
based upon the desires and current conditions of consumers."
Source: John Petrillo, "The Dawn of the Age of Intellectual Mobility," Multimedia Colloquium 1995. Harvard Business School
- "A group of senior executives, representing 16 of the leading Internet
software, telecommunications and digital commerce companies from around the world, today announced
the formation of the Global Internet Project (GIP) to promote the growth of the Internet across
geographic boundaries worldwide. The GIP also released a report exploring the present and future impact
of the Internet upon commerce and society and offered the first estimate of the worldwide impact of the
Internet on job creation. ... The Internet is a job engine: the Global Internet Project also announced that an estimated 1.1 million jobs
worldwide were created by the Internet in 1996. Commissioned by the GIP, investment bankers Takuma
Amano and Robert Blohm derived the number of jobs created by the Internet from a calculation that
extrapolated from this year's growth in US Internet, software, computer, chip, telecommunications and
equipment companies' market capitalization and employment. Amano and Blohm had previously
estimated value creation due to Internet market expansion to be in excess of $200 billion, a number that
reflects the sum-total stock-market capitalization of all of Netscape and Yahoo! and of those other
companies’ contributions to the Internet. Amano and Blohm declared the Internet accounts for this year's
entire US economic growth and they proclaimed the era of the Internet economy. 'The Internet is creating jobs while also improving productivity and lowering inflation. Moreover, because
the Internet is in the growth stage it is, it still hasn’t realized its full job-creating potential," they added.' "
Source: "Industry Leaders Announce Global Internet Project and Vision of Internet's Future; Group unveils first estimate of jobs created by Internet worldwide," Global Internet Project
- "About 150 years ago, the economy in the U.S. and Europe began to undergo a period of change more profound than any experienced since the end of the Middle Ages. We call that change the Industrial Revolution. The industrial economies are now in the early stages of another transformation that may ultimately be at least as significant. ... The revolution under way today will be driven not by changes in production but by changes in coordination. Whenever people work together, they must somehow communicate, make decisions, allocate resources, and get products and services to the right place at the right time. ... It is in these heavily information-based activities that information technologies have some of their most important uses, and it is here that they will have their most profound effects. By dramatically reducing the costs of coordination and increasing its speed and quality, these new technologies will enable people to coordinate more effectively, to do much more coordination and to form new, coordination-intensive business structures."
Source: Thomas W. Malone and John G. Rockart, "Computers, Networks, and the Corporation," Scientific American, Special Issue: The Computer in the 21st Century, p. 140
- "The final dimension of transformation is a new kind of internetworked enterprise that makes the virtual corporation look like child's play. We are on the threshold of a new digital economy in which the microprocessor and public networks on the Internet model enable fundamentally new kinds of institutional structures and relationships. The firm as we know it is breaking up. What's happening instead is this: effective individuals, working on high-performance team structures; becoming integrated organizational networks of clients and servers; which reach out to customers, suppliers, affinity groups, and even competitors; which move onto the public Net, changing the way products and services are created, marketing, and distributed. In economic terms, this means new models of wealth creation. In social terms, it means new systems for sustaining social development and improving quality of life."
Source: Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy, McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 91
- "The competitive business battles of the future will be fought not among nations (the United States versus japan versus Europe), although there will be contests between government-backed consortia in fields such as aerospace and some countries will contain a higher proportion of members of the world class. The competitive battles will be among global networks whose participants span many countries or regions. Depending on the industry, the range of locations and the sizes of the companies represented in the networks will vary; companies do not have to be giants to flourish in the new global networks. The route to success for people, companies, and localities is to become links in these global chains and to ensure that local activities meet world standards of excellence. Thus, cities and states -- local and regional economies -- will flourish to the extent that they provide linkage to global activities and networks. They must become world centers of distinctive world class skills. They must join the world class."
Source: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, World Class, Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 28
- "The transformation now taking place in the world economy is unlike anything we have experienced before. The increasing availability of global capital, coupled with advances in computing and communications technology, is serving to accelerate the process of globalization. Economies are becoming superconductors of vast flows of capital and transplants of production techniques. The barriers to globalization are coming down wherever you look: not just in Western Europe, North America, and Japan, but in the emerging giants of China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Indonesia."
Source: Jane Fraser and Jeremy Oppenheim, "What's New About Globalization," The McKinsey Quarterly, No. 2, 1997, p. 170
- "Some of these less developed countries have gotten so far behind that when they start entering the 21st century they will suddenly find themselves already there. Look at India, which has terrible infrastructure. India is booming as a technological center because it has leapt over all the old technology straight to the computer age. A lot of older people in places like India don't know how to use a phone, but they can use a computer. The places we call 'developing countries' are going to take over a lot of the fairly high-end tasks that developed countries like ours perform now. In 10 or 20 or 30 years, your accountant will be a person on a computer, soneone that you won't even know, and may very well be an Indian."
Source: Jim Rogers (author of Investment Biker), "Blessed Are the Underdeveloped," Forbes ASAP, December 1, 1997, p. 29.
- "Welcome to Free Agent, USA. Federal census takers can’t tell you how many people actually live here. Government mapmakers have yet to give it an official locaiton. But if you look for it, as I did, you can’t miss it. It’s out there, from coast ot coast, and it’s growing every day. The residents of Free Agent, USA are legion: Start with the 14 million self-employed Americans. Consider the 8.3 million Americans who are independent contractors. Factor in the 2.3 million people who find work each day through temporary agencies. Note that in January the IRS expects to mail out more than 74 million copies of Form 1099-MISC – the pay stub of free agents. So let’s hazard a guess. IF we add up the self-employed, the independent contractors, the temps – a working definition of the populaton of Free Agent Nation – we end up with more than 16% of the American workforce: roughly 25 million free agents in the United States, people who move from project ot project and who work on their own, sometimes for months, sometimes for days."
Source: Daniel H. Pink, "Free Agent Nation," Fast Company, December-January 1998, p. 132
- "Intellectual capital -- knowledge -- is becoming the most important resource in the economy, and we are going to see new financial instruments to buy, sell, trade, and leverage that resource. ... One of the major new financial instruments will involve the securitization of individuals. In the early Industrial Age, we created securities for large corporations. Then, early in the Information Age, we developed a stock market for fast-growth, startup companies. Now there are 'microcaps' -- smaller and smaller entities for capitalization. The ultimate logic leads to a market for the individual -- a stock in a person."
Source: Stan Davis, "Free-Agent Finance," Fast Company, December-January 1998, p. 152
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