Just imagine that Telkom has a competitor! Looking forward three years from now we can see Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, possibly two additional cellular operator licences and a fixed line competitor to Telkom.

As we spend more of our lives in cyberspace, a sense of community will become increasingly important in the electronic world and on the Internet as well as in the way we think about markets and market development.

The Web is a notoriously low-quality place when it comes to multimedia content. While voice over the Internet is, in some cases, no longer a pipe dream (depending on how good your ISP`s international incoming bandwidth is), streaming multimedia content is a drag.

Data dialtone means connectivity for anyone, anywhere, any time. Only the Internet comes close to this vision and is surely set to become the dialtone of the future.

The Gartner Group says that in the past year the topic of knowledge management has emerged as a major industry trend. It has the potential to generate as much hype, consulting revenue, misunderstanding and genuine business value as other industry juggernauts such as business process reengineering and groupware.

The more volatile, complex and rapidly changing the business environment, the more crucial it becomes to have an architecture established and applied to the organisation and its information systems.

A broad range of enterprises are using technology, networks and information to reshape the world. Whereas industrialism is about efficient production processes, the revolution today is based on networked information and how to create, manage and move it.

Even though there is practically no significant Web site without commercial advertising these days, I continue to think of the Net as an environment, a mirror of the world of sorts, in which anything can, and does, happen -- whether it makes business sense or not.

Businesses everywhere are grappling with a fundamental rethink and restructure around their customers and markets as companies are finding their processes cannot support their business realities.

The new economy is a digital, networked environment. At least that`s what they tell us. Trading of any kind will take place mostly online, with intellectual capital replacing more and more tangible, physical goods over time.

The year 2000 is still being regarded as an IT problem and is consequently being overlooked by many senior executives. But does being aware of the problem in your organisation mean you are in control of the problem?

While there is something liberating in the knowledge that there`s a piece of software, an operating system or a compiler that can fix all your immediate computing needs, the Internet has ultimately caused a loss of long-term vision in the world of software development.

Workplace dynamics are changing with the times. Technology has allowed companies to reconsider how its workforce can be accommodated, and organisations are benefiting from the cost savings of eliminating and consolidating office space and related overheads.