"We are living in a period of serious discontinuous change," CCH CEO Aletha Ling told attendees today at the first Computer Faire keynote address.
The keynote speeches are sponsored by ITWeb.
Ling said it is sometimes difficult to maintain focus when theorising about the New Economy. "It is easy to get side-tracked by the lunatic fringe or get overly daunted by the enormity of the task at hand."
She added that, because of the rate of change, traditional thinking and forecasting methods are no longer enough. Ling suggested three steps when trying to adapt to the new environment: understanding the future and what it holds, designing organisations and businesses on the basis of that understanding, and creating and implementing those designs.
Our understanding is still limited, she said, because the fundamental point that will change business and society has not yet been reached. "What is the New Economy equivalent of the production line?" she asked, stating that the Ford production line in the time of the industrial revolution was adopted as a philosophy throughout businesses, up to this day. That kind of general radical change, she contended, has not yet happened.
But the catalyst of the current change is most certainly the Internet, and the way we look at that may also be outdated. "A few years ago the Internet seemed to be about technology, about all the clever things we could do. It is not. It is about deep relationships," she said, referring to relationships between business partners, and between businesses and their customers. "The Internet allows us to learn about our customers, something we have been doing for a while, but it also allows us to apply that knowledge."
Ling said it is now generally accepted that business-to-business e-commerce will be massive in comparison with consumer business. She predicted that the Internet economy will be dominated by massive players, but that huge conglomerates of smaller players will be operating in collaboration around those giants. "Amazon has 80 000 small business involved in its network," she noted.
All these players, big and small, have to compete in a new environment of variable pricing and free products and services, while continuously making money in small units rather than in occasional large quantities, she said.
Ling also predicted that the immediate future will see a return to strategic thinking for New Economy business. "The past few years has seen a lot of experimentation, as is the case in any revolution. Many lessons were learned, but businesses will now go back to strategy." Profitability will also become fashionable again.
Ling subscribes to the analogy comparing the theory of evolution with the New Economy. How can businesses survive in a world where survival of the fittest is the rule? She believes radical innovation is the answer. "Now is the time to do away with dogma and redesign."
Share