The conventional wisdom about the future of information technology (IT) goes something like this:
| - Over the next few years, more and more homes and businesses will become equipped with broadband telecommunications - electronically fatter 'pipes' for handling data faster than ever before. These pipes (consisting mainly of optical fibre made by firms such as the USA's Cisco and Lucent and Canada's Nortel) will allow 'full-motion video' to be played across the whole of a PC screen - dramatically increasing the interest and entertainment value of the internet. Better still, the same broadband capabilities should, over the period between 2003 and 2005, become available even without pipes - to users of the mobile internet.
| - At the same time, we face a 'convergence' between the telecomms, computer, consumer electronics and media or entertainment industries, predicated on common digital 0s and 1s everywhere. One example: it is now possible to code and send voice calls using internet protocols (IP). This technology (known as Voice over IP) means that the same telecomms links can handle text, data, images and voice. At the very least, internet telephony promises to make long-distance conversations even cheaper than they already are.
| - The IT 'revolution', apparently, is not just about pipes, but about placing new devices in the hands of the user. Mobile phones will be able to handle the web more satisfactorily than today's 'WAP is crap' models, and personal digital appliances (Palm Pilots, Psion organisers) and TV games machines (Sony's PlayStation II, Microsoft's X-box) will continue to develop. At Comdex, an IT industry tradeshow held in Las Vegas in November 2000, Microsoft's Bill Gates demonstrated yet another kind of end-user device: a 'tablet', or webpad, which amounts to a thin, flattened-out mobile internet phone that is all screen, ready to take the user's handwriting, italicise it and email it at a moment's notice.
| There has to be some substance to the conventional wisdom, otherwise it would not exist. Well-regarded forecasting firms - Forrester Research, Gartner Group, IDC - base their projections on the real future plans and already recorded growth in shipments of major hardware and software manufacturers.
| But as the non-technical reader often suspects, there is an implicit fatalism in the conventional wisdom about the future of IT.
| In the popular subconscious, a kind of autonomous dynamo located in Silicon Valley spins out IT innovations at an ever-accelerating pace, like a Catherine wheel. The sparks of IT innovation fly out faster and more globally than ever before, aided by transmission at internet speed. In fact, the pace and diffusion of IT innovation is now held to be so rapid that businesses must ditch all plans for next year and instead compete on internet time, putting the accent on agility rather than strategy.
| But while broadband and web tablets will indeed come in over the next few years, the conventional wisdom neglects the human developers and installers of new IT - an expensive social force capable of frustrating the best-laid business plans and agency forecasts. It also misses the ways in which IT, being a medium and a tool, must distortedly reflect, like a cracked mirror, the larger priorities of society. These priorities, rather than anything inherent in the technology itself, are what will govern the future of IT.
| The examples of storage, the mobile internet and what I term 'e-therapy' show how today's neurotic human perceptions and behaviour, rather than tomorrow's all-conquering fibre and chips, are likely to direct the course of IT.
| Storage: the squirrel instinct
| Not so long ago, the old magnetic tape libraries on which large quantities of data were stored were seen as entirely unsexy. Now all that has changed. Machines and whole networks for the storage of data form one of the fastest growing sectors in IT today. A survey in November 2000 by Wit SoundView, of 155 US corporate clients of the Gartner Group, found that the average budget each had for storage was more than $50million - 40 percent up in the year 2000, and likely to rise by a further 45 percent in 2001. Storage supplier EMC is one of the brightest stars of IT, and the battle to control the market now embraces giants such as IBM, Sun, Compaq and Hitachi.
| With the spread of email and of fatter email attachments, corporations obviously have a greater need to store files than in the past. But the scale of society's desire to record what has happened in the past cannot be explained by technical factors alone. At the moment, London is seeing the construction of whole 'hotels' for storage machines - expanses of space that are 50,000 square metres in area. When simple computer memory comes to affect the capital's skyline, something else must be going on.
| The something else is the obsessive desire to capture everything a company does 'just in case'. An inflated consciousness of risk, and an uncertain attitude towards the future, makes companies want to build pyramids of all the minutiae of their finances from the year dot - in case a big shareholder has questions to ask about cashflow in 1986. Equally, companies want to archive every dealing they ever have with each customer - in case they should finally learn, in a way that their junk mail seems unable to register, something useful about that unfortunate individual.
| Firms want to store things because a rival's lawyers, or some other authority, may want proof of their ethical credentials - or because they feel they need back-up in the face of epidemics of hackers and viruses. Every employee expands demand for storage by copying information to superiors, subordinates and the six teams of eight people of which he or she is a simultaneous member.
| The growth of storage seems to be driven by nothing more profound than the squirrel instinct. In this, the prioritisation is not about providing the foundation for confident future actions, but expresses a kind of backward-looking insecurity about past transactions.
| The internet goes mobile - when?
| The mobile internet has much to recommend it. After analogue and Global System Mobile (GSM) forerunners, the coming of third-generation Universal Mobile Telephone Service will make both incoming and outgoing calls and data more sensitive to time, place and personal preference. The programming of a wire-free device can be arranged so that calls and data arrive only at moments and places judged convenient by the user. Data about local conditions can be made to change as the device changes location. On top of this, different levels of programming can be bought, in part to allow personal preferences to reach different levels ('I'll always take a business call at lunch, except on Fridays').
| Yet despite the possibilities offered by the mobile internet, companies remain ambivalent about this technology. It is not simply that a full transition to 'one-number' wireless telecommunications for each employee is an expensive and often enervating business. A deeper fear is that, in a world where employees can claim to be at work anywhere, there are few roadmaps to assure unity of corporate purpose, team spirit, employee loyalty, personal motivation or decisive leadership. Many communications can be exchanged; but whether they can or will be understood, replied to and acted upon while people are on the move is a very different issue.
| For all the reputed speed of innovation in IT, nobody has yet fulfilled the obvious human desire to integrate a mobile phone with a leather wallet, or with a digital camera, or with mobile printer. This complacent attitude to users hardly augurs well for the 'human resources' dimensions of the corporate mobile internet. The problem with the mobile internet is not that the screens on mobile phones are too small - they were designed for phones, not the internet, after all. The problem is that companies are too small-minded to realise the potential of the technology. They fear that employees will use mobiles to skive off work, while commercial secrecy ensures that companies cannot and will not inform employees of important developments. Moreover, competition inside corporations prevents the kind of transparent knowledge management that the textbooks call for and mobile IT facilitates.
| Referring to their underdeveloped and chaotic nature, the noted Danish ergonomist Jacob Nielsen has already described fixed-line corporate intranets as the 'third world' of the internet. For cautious managers, mobile corporate intranets promise to spread the law of the jungle as never before.
| Therapy-2-Victim (T2V)
| The name of the game in ecommerce used to be business-to-consumer ('B2C') - and there remains room for mainstream retailers that have combined bricks with clicks to make some money here. Then the game became business-to-business ('B2B'). Even in this sector, there are felt to be too many websites chasing too little business; but the potential savings to society from B2B internet exchanges are enormous none the less.
According to Goldman Sachs (2000), the likely savings brought about by B2B ecommerce, as a percentage of turnover, range from as much as 29 to 39 percent on electronic components, to 15 to 20 percent on freight transport, to 15 to 25 percent on forest products, to five percent on healthcare and two percent on coal. Goldman Sachs confirms that the biggest savings in terms of inventory, turnover time and transaction costs are to be had in the application of 'New Economy' B2B ecommerce, not to media and communications, but to 'Old Economy' physical things: to electronic components, metals and raw materials.
| Yet despite this evidence, some of the most striking growth in ecommerce is in sectors which are less to do with saving money and more to do with saving the Western self from its enormous range of indulgent anxieties.
| Take anxiety about health. In B2C ecommerce, websites selling pharmaceuticals - and especially prescription drugs - have multiplied dramatically. In the UK, the government's NHS Direct is online, dedicated to solving all our health problems over the web. In the private sector, NHS Direct is rivalled by NetDoctor.co.uk, offering answers, patients' support groups and interactive 'self-testing'; and Nutravida.com, which offers vitamins, minerals and supplements in packs entitled urban living, men's vitality, hangover and - inevitably - detox.
| It seems that more and more entrepreneurs and corporations in mobile IT want to give us round-the-clock checks on every aspect of our bodies. In the USA, the National Institute of Mental Health's website gets 15,000 hits a day, and mainstream employers can now give each of their employees an online therapy programme for a mere $36 a year.
| Or take the therapeutic distractions to today's hassles offered by electronic toys, games and gaming services. Apart from the massive success (among adults, not just children) of PlayStation II, both toy manufacturers and giant mobile concerns plan a massive expansion of web-enabled games. In Asia, online gaming cafes with names like Aztec and Haansoft have built significant audiences. In the UK, consumers will shortly be able to bet on the horses, the dogs and football online, through their television sets.
| And just look at the different kinds of therapy which the UK government promotes over the web, in its £1 billion UKonline scheme to put all public sector services online by 2005. Already, the Foreign Office will tell you how to avoid danger abroad, and the Department of Trade and Industry will help you bone up on the burgeoning field of company law. Arriving soon: the Citizen's Portal, a kind of America Online or Yahoo! entrée to the web. The portal will feature 'life episodes' which, according to UK e-government minister Ian McCartney, will help people 'navigate the complexities of public services at important times of change - such as having a baby, going away or moving house' (1). Coming by the end of 2002: 6000 online centres in libraries, post offices and elsewhere, 'where you will be able to surf the net, and get advice and training if you need it'.
| In early 2000, after all, UK prime minister Tony Blair floated a scheme for putting tens of thousands of young people in touch with adult 'mentors'...equipped with mobile phones. The common feature of all these services is that they offer therapy to people who are more or less designated as victims. Therapy-to-victim, or T2V, comprises much of the content that is coming on the web, and it is a content almost completely ignored by mainstream boosters of IT.
| Behind the hype about pipes
| In the e-world, as in the real world, displacement activities are easier to come by than genuine innovations. So the real significance of the new IT pipes is not as straightforward as the technological determinists claim. Their inane influence ensured that corporate demand for the new data networks was overestimated, so that the whole telecommunications sector has recently fallen from grace on Wall Street. But insofar as broadband makes for a more sensuous, more instant world of TV-like videostreaming on the net, it remains the perfect kind of distribution technology for tomorrow's therapeutic content.
| The net is changing. It will become more like CNN, with 'breaking news' that is personalised and related to your geographical position. In general it will become more 'lean back' - the ergonomist's description of the human posture with TV - rather than 'lean forward', which is what PCs demand at the present. It will put surfers back on to the couch, not just in the sense of couch potato, but often in the sense of psychiatrist's couch too.
| The success of Open, Rupert Murdoch's web-over-TV operation in Britain, is a sign of things to come. We can be sure, too, that the shopping and financial services that Open and others like it offer will grow more feelgood organic vegetables and feelgood ethical investments - indeed, will build whole 'virtual communities' of surfers who identify with such causes. Another sign of the times is director-general Greg Dyke's agenda for the BBC: his digital investments accompany exports of the infantile (Tweenies, innovatory Daleks), a move to get back into massive sports extravaganzas, and endless lectures in citizenship, parenting and lifelong learning.
| The real significance of new IT devices can also now be understood better. As broadband goes mobile, so the consumerisation of the mobile environment will accelerate - even at work, where the jungle of mobile intranets will further tendencies to do-your-own-thing. The mobile internet, touted as a means of always being in touch and thus of overcoming social alienation, will be likely to help atomise society even faster.
| Any kind of medium that can go mobile will. But whether the final kind of device is one you brandish or one you hide in your pocket, society's concerns promise to make the mobile internet device a lightning rod for insecurities about work time v leisure time, public identity v private life, individual freedoms and responsibilities to the state. And we can be sure that, as mobile devices join fixed ones in becoming more TV-like, state regulation of content across both will increase markedly. Even now, we can see this trend in the case of Barcelona.com, a small travel company whose domain name, registered in 1996, has cost it a court indictment at the hands of the Catalan municipal authorities; and in the ruling, by a French court, that Yahoo will be liable for French users dealing in Nazi regalia.
| But it doesn't have to be this way. None of the defects that surrounds the web is the fault of the technology. They say something about society, not about pipes and devices.
| Take the issue of digital 'convergence'. More and more commentators have come to be critical of naive theories of convergence, and for good reason. Even suppliers of web portals accessible by and common to PC, TV and mobile, admit to being divided into three distinct companies - because, they lament, the corporate 'cultures' across the three industry environments are very different. Certainly the forces of competition inside companies, let alone between them, make for divergent supply-side technologies. In addition to this, there are a bewildering variety of different and largely incompatible pipes and devices on offer.
| These problems are all to do with the past and present evolution of the market system. The potential for convergence is real enough. Indeed, one of the merits of voiceover IP is that, if you cannot find what you want from a service provider on the web, you will soon be able to click your way straight into a phone call to what Cisco calls an IP (for internet protocols) Contact Centre - basically, an old-fashioned call centre, but equipped with full internet facilities too.
This is progress; although given that most call centres are now little more than automated offices for managing customer rage, it is progress of a very limited sort. In a recent survey of the New Economy, The Economist magazine rightly pointed out: 'The most important aspect of the new economy is not the shift to high-tech industries, but the way IT will improve the efficiency of all parts of the economy, especially old-economy firms.' (2)
| When IT is more fully applied to staff and passenger information in rail transport, to the fulfillment of deliveries from robotised warehouses, to agriculture, construction and recovery from floods, to production, research and development - then we will get something more progressive than a stored message.
| James Woudhuysen is professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is coauthor of Why is Construction so Backward?, Wiley-Academy, 2004 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA))
(1) Computer Weekly, 26 October 2000
(2) The Economist, 23 September 2000
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