BIT3M Project

Background

The Business in the Third Millennium (BIT3M) programme was set up to explore the hypothesis that digital information will have a major impact on the way business evolves - or changes discontinuously - in the next decades. Since the impact might be different in Asia, the US and Europe, the Programme had partners in all three geographies and cultures.

Sami's Role

The Programme started with the construction of scenarios to describe possible ways that digital information could impact society, and hurdles to this. By examining the roles of business, government and individuals a major new entity was identified - that of community.

New Relationships

There are several changes from the conventional relationship that we previously assumed between business, government and customers.

The first stage of the research identified the importance of the individual - who may take many roles, eg consumer, citizen, leader, manager. One of the characteristics of the new environment is the "unboxing" of individuals and our decreasing ability to predict individual and community behaviour.

It also identified the decreasing capability of governments to control their geography, the increasing role of NGOs and regulation, and the importance of the infrastructure - covering both social aspects like education, law and order and health, and the media and technological infrastructure.

What we carried forward to the next stage of the programme is the importance of the community concept, driving many of the changes in individual behaviour.

Four scenarios

Our four scenarios had axes of business agility and community. Business agility was assumed to drag with it government agility and agility in the social infrastructure, community is strongly linked to individual and lifestyle choices.

• In Liberation Works, a sense of community develops to provide a rich and well balanced social environment, and business practices remain those of the 90's. This is a "Greenpeace" world which reconciles global and ecological concerns with business and individual interests.

• In Gung Ho, there is also a sense of community, but since the business and social infrastructures have adapted these may be less dependent on geography. Business has found ways of meeting their customers new wants, but because of the lags in the adaptability of government have had to take over some of the regulatory roles of government.

• MegaCorp is a world in which the sense of community, and governments,have not been able to evolve, and so the large companies have established new rules. This is the nearest to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".

• Finally, Organisation Rules - this scenario was originally named "France", but equally applies to Japan. Here the sense of community comes from family or work, both of which are hierarchic in their nature.

Conclusions

Why the scenarios might not forecast societal behaviour

However the big question - as we found from the work on why forecasts miss the bullseye - is whether the technology will find applications which are used and adopted. The successful applications, and their rate of adoption, will be different in each scenario.

Under the heading of community and the related lifestyle issues, we saw that the there would be major differences in each scenario.

This meant that we needed to investigate the sources and nature of the differences, covering questions such as how does the relationship between the individual and society change in each scenario? and how will this alter customers expectations of business?

The nature of community and the relationship to digital information needs to be explored via looking at existing and new role models, their stability and reasons, the values and objectives and the effect of this: then the implication could be seen for each scenario.

We asked questions arising from the Business Agility axis which related to the way in which digital information accelerated or held up organisations. Two aspects emerged - what is the impact on value creation and sustainability? and what is the impact on culture and processes - in particular, what are the new value chains?

The governance environment will also be different for each scenario: the questions to answer are how will governments evolve to meet the new environment? In what ways will regulation encourage or discourage the new world? How will governments fund themselves?

Early indicators

Early indicators are specific events that are relatively easy to watch for which can give an indication of which way society is evolving.

In BIT3M, we saw some early indicators being satisfied for both MegaCorp and Gung Ho, and as a result proposed that some industries at least would evolve in this way, and Business Intelligence should be aligned to these.