Future Enterprise- Future of Startups

The Future of Startups

The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, David Hunter Tow, predicts that the Startup culture will provide the key to a more productive, peaceful and sustainable planet by offering a new era of creative worTk and training with the potential to reduce poverty and conflict, while focussing on solutions to the looming crisis facing the planet from unstoppable climate change.

The Startup phenomenon can be likened to the first industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries that radically transformed all aspects of world society by improving living standards and providing new ways to release the creative potential of new generations.

A whole new culture is emerging based on providing support for a new breed of Startup entrepreneur through business structures and processes that include-incubators, accelerators,  mentoring and training and equity partners. Startup enterprises now number in the tens of thousands and embrace virtually every significant social, business and industrial process. This nascent culture is rapidly evolving into a global force - gaining structure by coalescing around a number of Hubs, Networks, Ecosystems and Industry and Application Sectors.

Major Hubs are currently based in most of the world's larger cities including- London, Berlin, Istanbul, Helsinki, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Auckland,  Singapore, Beijing, Bangalore, Sydney, Paris, Sao Paulo, Moscow , Reykjavik, Tallinn, Chicago, Manilla, Milan, New York and Barcelona, as well as the major iconic San Francisco/Silicon Valley nexus. At the same time a number of emergent hubs are gathering momentum in most urban regions of Africa,  Middle East, Asia and South and Central America.

No process or application, no matter how entrenched or fiercely guarded by its traditional custodians will be exempt from the impact of the Startup’s disruptive agenda, with every activity embedded in the operation of modern civilisation likely to be transformed into a more streamlined and productive form- available primarily via inexpensive digital mobile platforms.

This re-engineering is occurring not just in the traditional online service sectors of retail, marketing, advertising, entertainment, travel and media, but increasingly in the professional service areas of knowledge management- education, healthcare, law, insurance, design and finance. Industrial sectors are also flexing up with smarter solutions, supporting engineering, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, energy, transport, distribution, supply and communications, developing as well as developed countries.

Reading the Signals

But this shift to a smarter planet isn’t solely a big enterprise or big city initiative. In the near future every small town and regional community will also spawn its own Start up ecosystem. It will become a way of life offering a new form of work and play, with creativity the main currency.

It is gradually dawning on Government and the commercial and industrial establishment  that this is going to be the future way to create a new generation of viable businesses and economy. In the process it will likely disrupt and displace the existing 20th century paradigm for building a civilisation, taking no prisoners. And if today's enterprises want to survive they will very quickly need to adapt.to this new world order.

But for the larger enterprises in particular this will be an almost impossible task. Social and technology commentators, big business and Governments until now have largely underestimated the significance of this revolution , seeing it as an add-on phenomenon, complementary but not essential to the functions of the traditional economy.

Big mistake.

Misreading the significance of past economic disruptions such as the explosion of small desktop

computers and the Internet has led to the demise of many seemingly invulnerable organisations. Just ask IBM about its near-death experiences in these areas. The economy and our social fabric is undergoing the next wave in a series of rapid and radical global changes that will dwarf the original industrial and digital revolutions.

The Startup phenomenon is just the latest in a rolling wave of technology driven changes reshaping our relationship with the planet and triggering a whole new way of survival. And most significantly it is achieving this by releasing the full global potential of human creativity.

And the reason for this burgeoning hyper-growth cycle at the start of the 21st century is because it is meshing simultaneously with a number of other revolutions including those of the sciences, arts, knowledge and artificial intelligence, education and work, as well as advanced digital technology and social development.

The New Players

The primary mover and shaker- the heart and soul of all these revolutions is the Internet/Web, with its payload of exponentially increasing information, now available to all via commoditised mobile portals. This represents the next phase in the democratisation of the world’s storehouse of precious knowledge, driven by the imperative to fulfil the potential of the vast under-educated populations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that have previously missed out on our planet’s bounty. It creates a level data playing field by allowing any citizen with a mobile phone or tablet regardless of location or income, to access a common knowledge universe.

Piggy backing on this pinnacle of this human intellectual achievement is the education sector which is now well on the way to providing the means of delivering this vast treasure trove in easy to absorb bite size chunks via virtually free MOOCs – Massive Online Open Courses, providing equal access to quality education and training at all levels within across the planet.

And right on its heels, leveraging the benefits of this educational bounty is the revolution in work practice- now catalysed by the Startup industry.

The nature of work is now undergoing a dramatic transformation, flexing up to allow the transfer of skills from cheaper as well as high quality expat off shore sources of labour. But Startups have the potential to take this transfer to another level; to redress the global employment problem, eventually providing opportunities for skilled employment at the local community level.

A major Startup Hub- the Founder Institute , with chapters in 55 cities across 30 countries has just declared that over 1000 companies with a total portfolio value of $5billion have  graduated from its program in the last four years.  And the Institute and other countless incubators around the world are not just attracting the typical demographic of twenty to thirty year olds with computer science and software engineering backgrounds, but entrepreneurs of all age groups - middle aged executives, trade and factory workers and housewives- even retirees still chasing their lifetime dreams; all with the vision and wisdom of hindsight that only serious life experience can provide- ready to grasp the opportunities that a younger generation cannot yet conceive of.

Following a hobby or passion has always been an intrinsic part of human nature. It is no different in the digital age. The over fifties, sixties, seventies and even eighties now utilise the web as much or more than the under thirties and in a more active way than passively downloading music or videos. Surveys have shown they are also more astute at utilising social media for real benefit. The software skills required to transform that hobby or creative idea into a digital app is the simplest part of the equation- capable of being easily and inexpensively outsourced to an expert or automated app generator. After all, the technical skills required to design a blog or website used to be challenging for the average citizen. Not anymore. Now anyone can use a free template from Google and be up and running within ten minutes. The same is happening with app technology for example with the MIT app generator.

This is the new world where age is not a barrier but an advantage and where creative content and innovation is king.

The infrastructure required to support this new work/play revolution is also dirt cheap; an old warehouse with some discarded tables and chairs and cheap commodity smart phones and laptops or servers- sufficient even for graphics and game developers. For brain storming or practical sessions with an engineering or financial expert with forty years heavy duty industrial experience - a comfortable coffee bar or a friend’s garage is sufficient.

Cities or precincts that were once derelict and dying such as exist in Detroit, Denver, East Berlin or devastated New Orleans are finding a new lease of life by Startup communities; at the same time solving another endemic problem in society- unemployment and crime. Street kids, high school dropouts and jobless university graduates can be rapidly absorbed into this culture with some initial mentoring and training, offering creative opportunities and refuges no different from the arts and crafts sectors that have adopted similar supportive practices for decades. In fact there’s now a significant overlap and synergy between technology and arts communities, sharing creative spaces, ideas and marketing strategies.   

Downsizing the Enterprise

No wonder established enterprises of all hues- from the technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Cisco, Verizon, Samsung, Yahoo, Amazon and IBM as well as Government agencies and big business in manufacturing, energy and banking- from NASA to Goldman Sachs, GE, Cisco, Shell, Phillips, Siemens, Panasonic, Ford and Toyota are cashing in on this potential bonanza, supporting and mentoring Startup communities- not so much to make an immediate profit but just to gain a footing in this ultra-competitive new survival game.

Most have either spun off their own internal Startup divisions like IBM or like Google are having a bet each way, aggressively offering to support other promising hubs such as the recently expanded Sydney Incubator tapping into the network of Australian University students.

For those enterprises that don’t or can’t adapt to this new universe, the gig will be up. Just as the empires of ancient times - the Romans, Greeks, Persians and Chinese dynasties or later British, Portuguese, Dutch, French and Spanish colonisers- all thought they were masters of the universe with their new technologies of guns and ships; but eventually overreached and lost the plot, misreading the pro-nationalist signals and  new awareness of a changing world.

Now the new technologies keep exploding relentlessly, with the Cloud, mobile technology, virtual reality, the Internet of intelligent objects, big data, artificial intelligence, robotics, massive bandwidth, software defined networks, more flexible database structures and open source software, setting the pace.

But just over the horizon lurks the next generation of technology powered by – the intelligent Web with human like intelligence, quantum computing and teleportation, direct thought transfer via sensory headbands, the Precog society where prediction is the norm, insect sized drones and giant social observatories such as the original billion dollar EU FuturICT blueprint. Also the emergence of the global human superorganism- the response to increasing globalisation in the face of intractable global problems requiring urgent solutions such as climate change and conflict.

Future Shock has arrived.

And each time the technology explodes it exposes more opportunities as well as existential risks to humanity. The current generation of dominant tech providers- Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are already looking vulnerable; with Google overreaching just like the ancient empires; and Facebook’s invasion of user privacy- likely to go the same way as Myspace; and Apple- passed its innovative peak, likely to become another producer of commodity devices such as Nokia. Even Microsoft is on the ropes unable to make the paradigm shift needed to survive thenew world order.

Big enterprises have a habit of believing their own rhetoric of infinite growth with a delusional mantra of taking over the world in their market niche. Unfortunately they never studied physics and the limits of computation, information and energy, as the power of entropy inevitably dissembles their structures.

So the traditional notion of an individual's job and work-related role is already outdated. Work value in the future will be measured in terms of contributions to personal and organisational goals, together with social utility, whether for a two person startup or two thousand employee company.

By 2025 most tasks in heavy industry such as mining, construction, manufacturing and transport will be largely automated and robot-assisted. But such projects will also be increasingly managed and resourced on a real-time basis within the Web's global knowledge network- driven by innovative algorithms generated by next-gen apps.

Work and Play

By 2030 organisational boundaries and work practices will be fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisational structures; adding value and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing vocational programs.

And Startups will play the leading role in generating this new innovative world of work and play as a hothouse for generating new ideas and skills. Opportunities for Startups will therefore abound. Why? Because every current major provider of products and services whether- big pharma, big banks, big media, big agriculture, big construction, big government or big cities will be desperately in need of a makeover with their clunky and inefficient 20th century legacy systems not cutting it in the 21st roller coaster super competitive world.

Likewise professional services in marketing, healthcare, travel, law, media and finance will be dominated by apps and algorithms generated by small agile second and third generation Startup companies.

A revolution in social development is also changing the way populations are coping with massively expanding populations and dwindling resource options, by returning to smaller self- sufficient and cooperative urban communities linked by high bandwidth communication and transport networks which will facilitate work, food  and water security and learning opportunities in a Startup age.

Although big factories using automated robotic processes for producing industrial components - steel, concrete, glass, cars, turbines, trains and solar panels will still be essential using a mix of advanced technologies such as 3D printing, the streamlined and flexible information services needed to manage, market and optimise such products are more likely to be created by the host of future creative Startups- not the few software goliaths still lingering from of the 20th century.   

This future downsizing of the enterprise aligned with local community structures augers well for the nascent Startup industry with its naturally flatter decentralised architecture, allowing a more flexible capacity to adapt to market signals rather than through rigid centralised control communications. Startups also have the capacity to upscale more flexibly using cloud-based frameworks and by forming cooperative networks rather than expanding centralised silos.

And Startups are not only leveraging new information technologies but also the new sciences of materials, biology, chemistry, physics and energy including- graphene- the next electronics

replacement for silicon; artificial photosynthesis- the future hope for solar energy; optical physics- for invisibility cloaking and super lasers, quantum computing and information teleportation ; synthetic biology- for growing organs and creating organisms to clean up pollution. Even gene sequencing machines, atomic microscopes and analytic laboratory processes are being downsized to desktop level, closing the comparative cost differential between rich and poor countries and large and small enterprises.

And governments are loving it- because Startups are offering a silver bullet to generate prosperity- a low cost simple way to foster new industries and jobs without the burden of expensive infrastructure, offering the next generation entry to a better life.

The fight against big enterprise corruption, bribery, price gouging and market cartels by big enterprise also benefits in a down sized decentralised app society. There have been numerous recent exposures of the underlying level of corruption, bribery, conflict of interest and contempt for customers within the finance and banking industries, as well as major sectors of the mining and construction industries. But if government regulators have failed to prevent the misuse of shareholder and public funds then agile Startup competitors offering cheaper, safer and more convenient services, may do the job for them.

An example is the payments sector. Many smaller agile groups from technology and infrastructure poor African countries such as Kenya have taken the lead in these services of convenience and already provide perfectly viable mobile phone money transfer and business transaction services via text and a pin number, bypassing expensive western banking services.

Both banks and private equity funds are now scrambling to join the Startup race. But the banks are slow to shed their conservative no-risk attitude to lending and the large venture capital funds are being outflanked because of their elitist attitude, refusing to get involved until they are sure the Startup is well on its way to stardom. But in a future high risk roller coaster world there is no such thing as certainty and the professional funds are now at risk of being outflanked by the more nimble networks of crowdfunders and syndicates of wealthy Angel investors, happy to take a gamble, offering both seed capital for visionary ideas and serious followup investment for likely winners; gaining the advantage of an inside rails run to grab the major payoff  prize.

Saving the Planet

But the Startup has a much more important role to play in today’s world.

The latest climate report predicts our climate will be irrevocably changed within thirty years if we don’t change direction – despite all the current advances in renewable energy technology and efficiency savings.

By focussing on innovations in sustainable energy and poverty reduction- rather than trying to emulate another superficial social media or marketing billionaire, today’s Startups can play an essential role in saving the planet and its human cargo, including themselves.

This is an indicator of the potential power of the maturing Startup industry, as a global phenomenon which also might just save the planet through the unleashing of an explosion of innovation and idealism; designing more resilient and sustainable systems, reducing the pressure on the planet’s ecosystems and supporting more cohesive communities; at the same time generating new pathways to peace through cooperative globalisation- offering hope for future generations in a time of existential crisis.

Today's Startup is therefore not only a powerful force for change but also for survival.

A Level Playing Field

They are also beginning to gain the upper hand in the marketplace of ideas. A tipping point is already emerging. There is now more investment capital available than viable projects. No more the demeaning cap in hand pleas by desperate entrepreneurs for funding - prostrating themselves in ridiculous speed

pitching marathons- often losing control over their IP in the process of a desperate race for assistance.

Now there are many more alternative funding options to tap such as crowdfunding and Angel syndicates- more financial supply than startup demand; Universities, such as Stanford, MIT and Sydney as well as tech companies and government agencies are also competing with established VC firms, with many lower-tier VC firms caught in the squeeze, at risk of going to the wall.

So now it’s the VC firms turn to do the pitching and make concessions for a limited supply of viable Startups. Just look at the massive investment flows that are inundating the Startup industry.

How things change.

For the entrepreneurs and founders it means more control, more funding choices, and shorter lead times.

The centre of gravity of the talented app developers and entrepreneurs is also shifting away from the US back to their country of origin. Until recently at all levels of science and technology the US has been living on borrowed overseas intellectual capacity. For the last fifty years it succeeded beyond its wildest expectations in seducing the most talented of the world's minds to assist achieve its scientific and technological dominance, with offers of scholarships, state of the art research facilities, career paths, permanent residency and financial packages an order higher than their own countries could offer. And during the last fifty years hardly a research paper of any significance was published without input from a researcher of European or Asian origin. And the American economy prospered beyond all expectations.

But now the game is over, with governments across the world able to offer their talented graduates and entrepreneurs the necessary home grown incentives and facilities to pursue their careers in their own countries; at the same time contributing to their own national development.

So the Startups of tomorrow will be much more evenly distributed with a more level playing field and the world can look forward to an explosion in creative and innovative potential across all nation states. In tomorrow’s world there will be no alpha nation. Each Startup ecosystem will develop its own expertise in its own way, which it will then share with the world.

Preparing  for the Future

By the mid-forties the earth’s climate will have irredeemably changed to something much more violent and unpredictable if we stay on our current trajectory, even accounting for the growing use of renewable energy sources and greater efficiencies The best we can now hope for is to slow Armageddon down, but we may not be able to reverse it.

Climate change triggered by global warming will dominate every business and social decision within the next decade. Every country, community and company has to make it front and centre in their planning processes- what to produce, how to produce it, where to produce, in order to minimise energy consumption and slow the release of carbon.

The Startup culture will play a pivotal role in this process- the key to the planet’s redemption. But only if its focus shifts to developing sustainable, educational and humanitarian processes and products rather than infantile notions of  becoming the next billion dollar enterprise.

Let’s hope that the current and future generation of  founders, investors and new enterprises don’t lose sight of the real prioriies facing planet Earth and have the wisdom to avoid being dazzled by ephemeral dollar signs.

Otherwise they too will be swept away by its apocalyptic endgame.

Future Enterprise- The Future of Big Enterprise

The Director of the Future Enterprise Research Centre- David Hunter Tow argues that the credibility of the Enterprise brand, particularly Big Enterprise, has been severely damaged in recent times and can only be remediated by meshing more closely with the entrepreneurial technologies of the Web and the norms of a more sustainable and ethical society.

But the future doesn’t wait for perfect solutions and the Big Enterprise is now caught in a roiling sea of change, having consistently failed to adapt to the social and technological imperatives of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The modern enterprise has emerged as a relatively recent force in social development; the child of earlier corporate and other business models, supposedly  a more dynamic and entrepreneurial entity than previous structures, allowing individuals to cooperate more efficiently to achieve a range of common legal, financial and social goals.

But it is not just rooted in the capitalist system, although its primary goal is usually the generation of a return on investment for its risk takers, whether private or public. Its goals may also be of a social, non-profit or purely philanthropic nature.

Along the way it has acquired the usual mix of fellow travellers - investors, shareholders, partners, regulators ideologists and lobbyists. But when operating as a typical risk taker, it has been allocated special privileges such as limited liability, low or non-existent tax breaks and other special exemptions including often State sanctioned dispensation to exploit the assets of the Commons- the natural endowments of the planet. These can include- previous heritage sites, mineral rights, natural forests and farming land, fresh water sources, unpolluted air and often intellectual property; originally reserved for the public as a natural right for their health and general wellbeing.

Particularly since the 20^th century the Enterprise has proudly emerged bigger and bolder, acquiring ‘multinational’ status and systematically utilising mass production and development methods largely based on fossil fuels, to exploit and degrade the planet’s resources- blanketing cities, waterways, farming  land and forests with acrid poisonous residues, often causing endemic disease and misery as it went.

Toxic mining and processing wastes still pollute rivers and estuaries, killing the marine life and destroying the health and livelihoods of many dependent communities. And this still continues in many developing and developed countries such as Australia, Canada, China and the US where petrochemical companies continue to spew out lead and other heavy metals as well as fracking and tar sand residues, polluting the pristine farming land and groundwater.

The modern enterprise may therefore be more entrepreneurial, dynamic and socially aware than its predecessors, but such travesties are still common and acceptable because along the way the ethics of larger enterprises got hijacked by their executives and regulators who lost sight of the fact that they had an obligation to act for the wellbeing of the community at large as well as maximise shareholders profits. Public servants in Government agencies also went along with this form of criminality and a revolving contractor door began creating massive conflicts of interest between regulators and managers, which continues unabated today.

And so began the era of the Big Enterprise-where corruption and the ‘winner takes all’ mantra became the behavioural norm within business oligopolies including- Big Pharma, Agri, Oil and Chemical, Defence and Armaments, Media, Retail and Commerce, Banking and Finance and Construction and Engineering industries; because might was right and scale was power and influence and smaller enterprises often became collateral damage, unable to compete effectively for market share.

And because Big Enterprises became so profitable and powerful, Governments continued to provide carte blanche for their exploitation of the planet’s finite assets and pollution became routine, particularly by Big Miners such as Chevron, which still refuses to pay compensation for massive destroyed tribal habitats in the Amazon and Big Banks that stole the savings of small investors and pension funds during the GFC and Big Agri companies like Monsanto which established seed monopolies over farmer’s rights on the  back of patented plant genes and Big Pharma that tried it on with human genes and Big Manufacturers of consumer goods that outsourced their production to substandard factories employing child labour in developing countries with no legal safety protection.

And the bigger they got, the more they assumed that the Commons was available for the taking, until today much of the original resources of a pristine planet has been stripped bare and big enterprise continues to consume them at 150% of sustainable capacity.

To counter the bad vibes it encountered from this pernicious behaviour, Big Enterprise also gathered an army of apologists and cheer leaders in the form of PR and lobbyist minions to sanitize their actions. They also recruited security companies to protect their stolen assets against pesky indigenous and activist groups who were outraged by their behaviour. Also police and spy agencies such as the NSA began collecting the names and personal records of those who interfered with lucrative enterprise arrangements such as price fixing and illegal waste disposal, on the pretext of preventing terrorism.

At the same time the creative accountants and corrupt auditors found ways to minimise the tax paid by enterprises, including tech giants such as Google and Apple, through the use of global tax havens or by channelling profits through minimal tax zones.

And really this litany of corruption and abuse has not been improving. If anything it has got worse in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. So despite the tens of thousands of sustainable small and medium law abiding enterprises with a conscience – mainly family businesses not intent on taking over the world, enterprises have been getting a reputation for exhibiting psychopathic, anti-social behaviour. In other words, if anything this cancerous growth in the corporate/enterprise sector has been metastasizing at an exponential rate.

Not a pretty picture. And eventually something had to give.

Finally in the late 20^th and 21^st century the tide began to turn. A new form of social enterprise  emerged- the activist NGOs –such as Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and Transparency International. These have gained traction- finding ways to fight back against the goliaths by exposing their excesses and successfully taking legal action. And smaller enterprises, like farmers markets and small scale renewable energy developers are becoming more innovative, creative and agile, offering a more personal and fairer option to the communities of which they are a part. 

The other change and it’s a big change, is that the community has finally turned against Big Enterprise, becoming sceptical of its anti-social practices and the hype and lies in the form  of deceptive marketing and glossy advertising campaigns; increasingly caught out by the social media, activists and whistle blowers. Their greed and naked criminality is being exposed like never before and governments are slowly being forced to act on their constituent’s behalf.

Enterprises and their shareholders and executive employees cannot hide anymore in gated enclaves behind bland anonymous websites, immune from the consequences of their actions. Through pervasive sensors and eyes in the form of the smartphone cameras of citizens, every action of the Enterprise is being monitored and reported. With the imminent advent of the Internet of Things or sentient objects, the pervasiveness of watchful sensors will ramp up exponentially.

When Big Enterprises pollute or destroy habitats in Africa, Asia or South America, with their products sourced from death trap factories, or supply chains packed with illegal conflict minerals, the world will be watching. The outcomes of enterprise actions will be reported in the social media as they regularly are now within milliseconds and that record will remain as a stain in the digital archives for perpetuity, accessible by prosecutors. There are now not just a handful of investigative reporters tracking the perfidy of big business, but the eyes and ears of citizens everywhere.

As well as the increasing crackdown on Enterprise corruption another revolution is underway. It is called Sustainability. To remain in synch with community aspirations in a globally warming world shareholders are being encouraged to punish enterprises that cause harm to the planet and its life forms, whether through use of fossil fuels, pollution or fraudulent practices, by withdrawing their investments.

Big Enterprises must not only produce profits for their shareholders - often Funds representing the savings of everyday citizens, but must also prove the delivery of socially sustainable benefits for the communities such as local indigenous groups from which they draw their sustenance in return for token jobs and royalties as in PNG. And the pressures for this investor-driven change are now enormous.

No more banks marketing fraudulent derivatives or rigging borrowing rates or Walmart outsourcing garments made by women and children working for a pittance in the fire factories of Bangladesh.

All  too often enterprises have are adopted a head in the sand attitude when confronted with anything that impacts their short term profits and executive bonuses – repeating the pathetic mantra- ‘It’s just business’ as a justification, similar to that of mafia murderers- as if business and society’s ethics can be separated. How can any reasonable planning forecasts for energy supplies, vehicle exports, wheat harvests or fashion garments be calculated without taking into account major geopolitical issues such as global warming and conflict affecting those markets. And yet this is exactly what many big enterprises and governments employing dozens of market analysts still produce.

Buy there’s a whiff of panic in the air from Big Enterprise. The fossil fuel extractors are beginning to realise that a large proportion of their oil, coal and gas reserves may now have to remain in the ground, where their assets will become liabilities. The major tourist hotel chain operators are also starting to sweat as they realise that the luxury resorts built in tropical hurricane zones such as North Australia and the Caribbean will have to be written off, as well as assets in the vast no go areas of the planet- those becoming lethally hot or potentially flood prone. Instead the scope for the smaller eco-friendly enterprises has expanded for those that don’t leave a footprint on the planet or believe eternal growth is mandatory.

So Global Warming and the concomitant need to mesh with the sustainability and ethical goals of the broader community are now emerging as two massive constraints and shapers of the Future Enterprise.

But a third factor has emerged that has caught most of the bigger businesses totally flatfooted.

This is the competition from the tens of thousands of next-gen innovators involved in entrepreneurial Startups funded by thousands of smaller non-bank investors, covering every application and industry that was once the exclusive domain of the Big Enterprise.

The services sector is now in turmoil with thousands of small agile enterprises based in cooperative  hubs in every major and many minor cities across the globe; cashing in on new opportunities to re-engineer traditional ways of doing business without the need for massive PR budgets or bribes.

And an increasing proportion of the population is becoming technically savvy and better educated, particularly in the massive emerging populations of India, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Global conglomerates across the planet are being stripped of their mystique and gatekeeper roles. They are also being stripped bare by the new wave of creative apps, with agile Startup groups disrupting every traditional industry process, from 3D manufacturing to mobile payments, from personalised healthcare to online education, from local eco-tourism to flexible online travel reservation;  using clever algorithms linked to the Internet and powered by cheap smartphones and pads

The smaller enterprise is becoming more innovative, creative, agile and competitive, offering a more personal and fairer option to the community. Innovation and creativity are the new buzzwords and the citizen beneficiaries are loving it.

And this is just the beginning.

The future enterprise will from now on be dominated by technology- from the Internet / Web and every other innovation that goes with it including- Virtual Clouds, Social Networks, Mobile devices and soon the Internet of Things - all available at a relatively low entry and maintenance cost. Technology will not just be an external enabler but will impact the very heart and soul of the enterprise, changing its structure and ability to compete in radical ways; allowing the smaller players to compete on a level playing field.

As the technological basis and norms of society shift, so the structure of the enterprise will also be forced to adapt.

And so we come to the fourth factor in the evolution of the Future Enterprise- the Virtual Enterprise.

The Virtual Enterprise- VE is much more opportunistic and is already here. It does not require its employees to be gathered under one roof or even in one country or controlled from one centralised management team. The VE marks the beginning of a networked distributed architecture obsoleting the traditional siloed hierarchical model of the 20th century.

In such a fast-moving logistical revolution, skills and techniques as well as materials have to be available on demand. Outsourcing of every process- from HR to Manufacturing to IT, including strategic decision-making, will therefore become the new norm. 

The workforce, partners as well as customers will be global as well as local, with lightning paced decisions made to optimise production or marketing as opportunities arise and where resources, including skilled and unskilled contractors- even robots, are ready to go. We see virtual flexibility today in the skilled expat diasporas and migration from high unemployment zones of Europe and Asia, supporting every industry from the mining to construction to finance.

Smaller enterprises will have a significant advantage in such a world- without carrying the enormous overheads and legacy of a large enterprise. The virtual enterprise will allow them to scale up or down as required. Without the artificial dichotomy of workers and management, a much more cooperative and flexible model of social evolution can be introduced.

This is likely to lead in fact to the structure of the future enterprise eventually meshing with that of the Web, at the same time connecting with community needs and aspirations on a symbiotic local, regional, national or global basis. Such a pervasive networked architecture utilising a Web based on much cleverer virtual Software Defined Network – SDN and Data Linked Architectures, will apply equally for big and small, public and private enterprises. This will facilitate distributed and largely autonomous decision-making, with the capacity to dynamically route information and intelligence- human or artificial, to key decision nodes as algorithms begin to dominate the management of more complex processes.

Organisational boundaries will become increasingly fluid and porous with individuals moving freely between projects and career paths adding value at each step, in turn allowing them to acquire new skills linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.

Conclusions

So today’s lumbering enterprise behemoths will likely be largely unrecognisable by 2030 - smaller, networked, far more flexible, agile, scalable and opportunistic as well as cooperatively tuned to the needs of the community as well as the customers they serve, eventually on a largely autonomous basis.

They will also apply the latest knowledge within a far more ethical and non-combative environment; cooperatively as well as competitively, applying sustainable methods of energy conservation and high standards of ethical governance.

Sound too good to be true?

Not really – just a logical and inevitable outcome driven by changes in the global environment which are already largely in train and in which the enterprise of the future will play an increasingly significant role.

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Future Enterprise- The Future of Services

The Director of the Future Enterprise Research Centre, David Hunter Tow, predicts that the current explosion of new services will trigger the biggest treasure hunt in the history of computing technology.

The Services Sector is currently in turmoil with thousands of startup companies cashing in on new opportunities to re-engineer traditional ways of doing business- and this is just the beginning.

Every process is currently being transformed into a new service- not just in traditional service sectors such as retail, media, education, healthcare, tourism and finance, but also in industry areas such as manufacturing- with made to order 3D printing techniques, medical processing- offering personalised DNA sequencing and diagnostics instantly on an iPhone chip, and inexpensive solar energy and water purification systems cheaply available for domestic use in developing countries.  

There’s not one established service process that’s not being seriously disrupted by smaller more agile independent players, leaving the lumbering giants that once dominated commerce in the 20th century stumbling blindly in their wake.

All major service sectors are currently being carved up, their key functions hived off and new innovations successfully introduced in competition with those of the original gatekeepers, continuing to guard their crumbling IP parapets, while new knowledge is generated by the terabyte.

What is catalysing this frenzy and where is it heading?
A number of convergent factors are involved in this 21^st century phenomenon – breakthroughs in new technology- mobile computing, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and information analysis,  massive social change in the form of deregulation of knowledge generation and access spurred on by the social media and global Web; and an unstoppable surge in the creative potential of a new generation steeped since birth in the cyber revolution, but now cheaply available; all combined with the very low cost of market entry for innovative entrepreneurs.

Of course online retail and marketing started the ball rolling in the nineties and has never looked back. Traditional main street bricks and mortar retail has been fighting a ferocious rearguard action, but by and large it’s been a losing battle ever since. The smart retailers hedged their bets by combining new boutiques and online websites, but overall, new leaders in the revolution such as Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google as well as thousands of smaller specialists, just kept upping the ante with greater global choice, faster service delivery and deeper discounts.

Then came the new wave of targeted retail service apps nibbling away at the leaders- companies like Foursquare peddling Deals of the Day- but now over 130,000 Android and 300,000 Apple apps covering- self-checkout, barcode scanning, loyalty programs, coupon and discount offers, retail location discovery, best buys, augmented reality advertising, customer reviews, consumer preferences and recommendations and mobile platform payment functions- all making the online and store shopping experience easier and more exciting. And for developers- the social media to inexpensively promote them.

In the meantime the traditional Media and Advertising industries were hurting. Gone were the salad days of broadsheets generating the golden streams of classified advertising revenue from job, real estate and used car advertisements; paying for the packed newsrooms and inflated expense accounts in five star global hot spots.  

In their place one stop outsourced stories and editorials with duplicated online headlines.

Again a frenzy of online experimentation began. But pay walls had only limited success, even for the heavyweights such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Classified and banner advertising continued to haemorrhage, migrating to web sites at greatly reduced prices and the social and alternative media led by a myriad young independent operators, grabbing the best headlines and news stories via cheap phones.

As a result the print operators such as News Ltd are only pale shadows of their former selves and have quietly retreated to the more glamorous world of cable television and film. But this is only a temporary reprieve as the low budget independent film and documentary makers gain ground on YouTube and in Arthouse cinema seats, shooting with low cost video cameras,  while at the same time chasing the more interesting reality footage; all supported by the citizen journalists and freelance bloggers desperate for a voice in the brave new cyber world.

As a result of this revolution the power of traditional media services has seriously waned and is likely to have largely disappeared within a few decades, replaced by countless personalised web channels and DVD and gaming startups, controlled by myriad smaller, more energised groups and individuals.

At the same time the Advertising industry is in a monumental bind- caught in the headlight glare of change; trying to find the magic brand formula for clients by mixing and matching the traditional and burgeoning new media- but apart from reverting to Google and Facebook, not having a lot of success with either, unable to capitalise effectively on the thousands of creative local specialists and the cornucopia of apps.

Over time traditional advertising will therefore become less significant to major brands as it transitions to an infotainment format, with thousands of independent product sites and apps providing instant comparative advice to consumers without the retrospin of big business.

Education

But the big revolution in services- the game changer of the 21^st century, will come from easy global access via mobile online learning to high quality inexpensive education. This, according to educators, will turn every mobile phone into a knowledge portal and return education to the golden age of sharing ideas among communities of scholars, releasing them from a boring classroom environment with second rate lecturers more interested in their next overseas conference schedule.

Interestingly the revolution is being led from the inside by some of the biggest and most hallowed institutions- Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale. Suddenly global tertiary level courseware and soon secondary level as well, is available at very low cost from these prestige US universities through massive online platforms such as Coursera; while third party reference sites across the Web such as Wikipedia, Google, Microsoft and Facebook plus a host of talented independent specialists will provide countless training services by integrating and coordinating domain related knowledge.

This is the next phase in the democratisation of the world’s storehouse of information, driven by the need to realise the potential of the vast under-educated populations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that have missed out on the planet’s opportunities. It will allow anyone with a mobile phone or tablet to access the same level of knowledge regardless of location, income or the availability of local training resources. 

Over the coming decades therefore the services of learning and education will undergo a profound shift, from the traditional classroom/face to face method of knowledge transfer to a much more abstract model, where teaching will be largely separated from its current physical infrastructure, such as classrooms and campuses.

It will also be linked to the Cyber Revolution- transforming the world’s knowledge base into a vibrant multimedia forum- using the latest 3D, virtual reality and gaming technologies- all delivered by smart mobile and embedded multi-media kinetic devices linked to the Intelligent Web.

Healthcare

Now the medical and healthcare services sector is also ripe for revolution. Phone apps are increasingly available to act as remote monitors for home based medical and health support purposes- the remote diagnosis of life threatening conditions and algorithms to calculate correct drug dosages and interventions for acute illnesses such as diabetes, malaria  and HIV.  

This revolution has been driven to a large extent by the healthcare needs of half the planet’s population that still live in dire poverty, unable to afford traditional life-saving hospital support or medication.

These and many other diagnostic  and treatment services are now putting patients at the centre of the management of their own healthcare with the help of trained volunteers, bypassing the bottlenecks involved in the traditional delivery of medical services by scarce qualified practitioners.

Future services will also be based on the accessibility of whole-of-life eHealth records across both the developed and developing world, eventually allowing the creation of online global health records from pre-birth to death, providing personalised remote support services delivered on an iPhone or community personal computer. Within a decade, health records will include the sequencing of an individual’s genome as a vital diagnostic service at a cost of a few dollars.

A number of other technological breakthroughs will mark the expansion of new healthcare services within the next few decades including - stem cell therapies to repair human tissue and organs, reversing heart disease for example;  prevention of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases such as  breast cancer and Alzheimer’s;  sensory repair such as early retinal and corneal implants; prosthetics including neuron-controlled limbs; brain/ nervous system interfaces, overcoming spinal paralysis using brain signals; and interactive humanoid robots to provide human companionship and physical support.

All will be available as relatively inexpensive services once the enabling technologies have been approved. Why? Because if the major healthcare companies don’t provide them at  an affordable price, entrepreneurial groups will, as occurred with the generic drug revolution in developing countries when Big Pharma refused to drop their prices.

 Finance/Banking

The Finance and Banking industry has been a sitting duck for radical change for a long time- getting bigger and more obese with minimal outside competition – seeking to control ever more functions in a frenzy of greed- from investment, transaction processing, payments, exotic specialist derivatives, consumer credit, foreign exchange, mortgage provision, money transfers, advice on mergers, trading and anything else that shows a hint of making easy money and inflating their balance sheets. 

There have been numerous exposures of the underlying level of corruption within the finance and banking industries, to the point of defrauding their own customers and incurring horrendous trading losses by rogue dealers through sloppy oversight, in the process threatening bankruptcy for themselves and their clients and culminating in the GFC.  But it didn’t deter them for long and despite some fresh regulations and a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars, their insatiable greed continued to explode.

But if government regulators have failed to reign them in - a number of agile competitors offering cheaper, safer and more convenient services, may do the job for them.

The major looming battle is between the traditional finance industry and the global technology giants such as Apple, Google and Paypal- using their skills at creating innovative software to provide Payment and Credit card services, using wireless apps that allow mobile phones to store loyalty and credit card information, make payments and transfer money. Technology-poor African countries such as Kenya have taken the lead in these services of convenience and already provide perfectly viable phone money transfer services via text, bypassing expensive banking services.

Now the bloated goliaths are fighting back with their own brand apps. Banks are also using contactless near field technology to convert smartphones into mobile credit and payment devices. But it may already be too late as the genie has escaped the bottle and the smart entrepreneurs realise the banking emperor has no clothes, except Wall-Mart hand me downs.

It is likely that banks in their present form will cease to exist within the decade, effectively disembowelled by smarter consumer and business service providers. They may become primarily back office transaction processors and routine mortgage providers, with a veneer of  deal making, offering a line of credit for smaller uncomplicated businesses. All other functions will become the province of highly skilled specialists.

And so the frenzy of creativity and service disruption will continue in all areas of commerce and industry, as the current generation of software engineers and innovators becomes acutely aware that the rules that propped up the old corporate structures are obsolete.

The old software guard that controlled the boundaries of commerce so tightly are also increasingly ripe for the picking because the original rules governing old sectors such as retail, media, manufacturing, banking, pharmaceuticals, photography, music, publishing etc, just don’t hold up anymore. They don’t reflect the changing social currents of the new era, stuck in the quicksand of the past. Therefore the software and systems houses that propped them up and contributed to their stranglehold, such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, HP, Yahoo, Cisco etc, are also irrelevant, weighed down by their own legacy technologies, now being systematically cannibalised by more agile and visionary players. 

Take any industry. Who buys the software that was developed for it in the 80’s or even 90’s? Very few, except the dinosaurs locked in by exorbitant long term maintenance agreements and they are now paying a very high price for their conformity- unable to adapt or switch systems before being swallowed by the next wave of innovation. Their present systems just don’t reflect the changing way of doing business or social norms that the new generation of consumers want and have come to expect.

The technology keeps shifting and each time it moves it exposes the soft underbelly of the existing services and providers. Those like IBM that have survived have had to radically remodel their businesses. In the case of IBM – from hardware to software to services and now to ‘smart planet’ systems.

The next generation of providers- Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook along with thousands of smaller service developers have already moved in on these crumbling bastions.  But even this new order are in turn being held to account by a host of smaller creative startups. And no matter how often the established leaders of any systems generation try to reinforce their monopolies by swallowing the smaller more agile enterprises, they are constantly outflanked by the tide of new knowledge and innovation.

And so the dance goes on – faster and faster and the treasure trove of potentially lucrative services keeps growing.

Future Enterprise- The Future of Big Data

The Director of The Future Enterprise Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, predicts that Big Data  has the potential to unlock greater value for the enterprise and society, but in the process will radically disrupt traditional organisational functions at all levels,- particularly between IT departments and decision makers.

The connotation of the term ‘Big Data’ is at best extremely fuzzy and at worst highly misleading. It implicitly promises major benefits in direct relationship to the quantity of data corralled by an organisation. But Big Data is also hedged with constraints, contingencies and uncertainties, requiring the solution of a number of associated problems before it can translate into significant enterprise benefits.
To unlock real value in the future will require-

The design of more responsive enterprise and knowledge architectures based on a network model, allowing for the delivery of realtime adaptive decision responses;

A closer relationship between the business and its social environment enabling the enterprise to better understand the Big Picture;

The introduction of common data standards and streaming of seamless integrated multiple data types;

A quantum leap in intelligence through the application of more powerful artificial intelligence based, analytic, strategic and predictive modelling tools.

The need to upgrade the quality and security of current storage and processing infrastructure beyond current cloud architectures.

 Networked Architectures

A more flexible and responsive knowledge architecture for the future enterprise must reflect the reality of increasingly complex decision making, allowing far more agile reaction within the fast changing competitive environment of the 21^st century.

This will involve the introduction of networked models at both the enterprise and information level, with nodes represented by decisions and information flows linking the relationships between them; eventually capable of autonomous adaptation within a constantly evolving social, technological, business environment.

.This Model, based on optimised decision pathways, with the capacity to dynamically route information and intelligence resources, supported by autonomous agent software, to appropriated decision makers, will be the core driver of Big Data architectures.  It must be capable of integrating and analysing streams of information from multiple sources in real time, channelling computing and information resources directly to relevant decision nodes, enabling critical decisions to be implemented in optimal time frames.

 
The Big Picture

 The capacity of the enterprise to mesh with its physical and social environment, will become increasingly vital for its survival in the future. Without such a grounded relationship, poor decision making based on an inwardly focussed mindset will continue to drive many large enterprises to bankruptcy.

 It will also be insufficient to plan just one, two or five years ahead. Although near-term sales and cost forecasts are important, understanding the bigger shifts likely to impact all businesses in a future dominated by climate change, geopolitics and globalisation, will be more essential to survival- allowing a better balance of creative planning, adaptive resilience and risk avoidance.

In fact enterprises- particularly the biggest, have a poor history in seeing the big picture. The larger the enterprise the more likely it is to believe in its own invincibility in the marketplace.

In more recent times both Ford and GM virtually went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the public purse because they would not or could not see the obvious shift in consumer sentiment to smaller cars with lower fuel usage. And then there was AIG, Lehman Brothers and Citibank and Fanny Mae which also thought they were too big to fail. And now the giants Kodak and Sony and many others are struggling.

 In all the above cases, enterprise management ignored the signals coming loud and clear from their environments via consumers and customers, through a combination of ignorance and arrogance. In the meantime other more agile companies such as Microsoft picked up the trend towards desktop computing and exploited the opportunities left by IBM. But then Microsoft almost lost the plot to Google by not seeing the emerging power of the Internet as the dominant driver of information in today’s society.

 So despite the use of the latest business intelligence software busily scavenging for patterns from Big Data generated from past customer and financial data, standard industry forecasts,  plus some glitzy dashboard software, typical BI analysis without the guidance of the big picture will be virtually useless as a pathway to an uncertain future.

 Big Data now has the potential to open the door to this broader and more inclusive vision, which has rarely been a priority for most enterprises in the past. But that will now change. Survival, particularly for larger enterprises will be based on interpreting the bigger picture’s impact. If managed effectively Big Data will be the catalyst that provides a hedge against this myopia, but only if management’s mindset becomes more flexible and humble.

The Intelligent Enterprise

Big Data will also trigger the need to become much smarter, utilizing the latest artificial intelligence and statistical techniques such as evolutionary algorithms, neural networks and Bayesian logic to achieve a smarter enterprise. The latest 'Smart Planet' paradigm shift, in which the infrastructure, business and environmental processes of the planet are being re-engineered to optimise performance and achieve more sustainable outcomes, will also be a major driver for the networked smarter enterprise of the future.

The Smart Planet imperative will demand that decisions relating to society’s survival and wellbeing be made more rigorously, efficiently, adaptively and therefore autonomously.
But a Smart Planet revolution without a Smarter Enterprise mindshift won’t compute.

 Part of that mindshift will be a far greater emphasis on the future. The past is still a poor predictor of what’s to come. To improve the quality of decision-making, serious realtime forecasting will need to be boosted. Such systems will rely on information collected from numerous internal and external sources within an environment, using artificial intelligence algorithms and rules to analyse vital signals and interconnected trends and patterns that generate complex outcomes. The results of this analysis will then be channelled autonomously to the appropriate decision-makers for action.

But despite a range of mathematical improvements in our foresight and modelling methods, developed in tandem with a broader understanding of scientific and social principles, the corporate capacity to forecast effectively has been sadly lacking when data doesn’t follow obvious trends or when the signals of emerging change are faint.

Most forecasting textbooks traditionally list a number of well-developed techniques based around time series projections, regression analysis, Delphi and scenario expert options, as well as artificial neural networks and simulation modelling. But these have usually failed to predict the future in times of abrupt change within the broader physical, social and economic environment, such as the recent extreme disasters of the global financial crisis or the Arab democratic revolution.

The next phase in this evolution will be models powerful enough to not just deliver predictions but accurately prioritise the resources needed to manage those predictions, and develop project plans for their implementation. Then track the results to check on their effectiveness. In other words utilise textbook automatic feedback control principles much more rigorously. After a bridge or power grid has been built, its maintenance needs to be permanently and autonomously managed to prevent future catastrophic failures or escalating rebuild costs, tracked by the latest generation  of intelligent sensors.  

This common sense methodology of feedback and continuous monitoring of outcomes has been sadly lacking in many enterprises but will now be essential if business and society is to survive the onslaught of massive future shock. It will involve scanning for emerging problems, aggregating data streams from millions of internet-connected sensor systems and monitoring the pulse of the global environment- not just at the business level but also at the political, technological and environmental flashpoints.

Processes based on Big Data therefore need to be recognised as the beginning of the our civilisation’s survival fightback; applying adaptive and responsive techniques based on massive datasets, largely autonomously, because they are so big and complex that manual methods will fail, to the optimisation of the design, maintenance and operation of every process and application on the planet.

 The Cloud Solution

Collecting and storing the tsunami of data resulting from Big Data overload is a major stumbling block to the above goal, already creating unforeseen problems for the average enterprise by generating exponentially exploding datasets; as the Science communities- astronomers, biologists, cosmologists and particle physicists, have already discovered.

Traditional Relational or Hadoop databases, SOA architectures and SQL databases are not optimised for such massive real time processing, particularly as much of the data in the future will be unstructured and garnered from heterogeneous sources such as web pages, videos, RSS feeds, market intelligence, statistical data, electronic devices, instrumentation, control systems and sensors.

But just in time, Cloud processing management has emerged, offering an alternative solution, which few large organisations will be able resist. Now they will have the seductive choice of offloading the complete data management side of their operations to third parties in return for economies of scale and flexibility. The tradeoff is partial loss of control, but over time, providing security, backup and service levels are maintained at a rigorous standard, the organisation should benefit by being able to improve its focus on the core critical aspects of its operations. Only time and verification will tell if this tradeoff can deliver on its promise.
The IT department will be virtually invisible to decision-makers with the primary task to select the appropriate tools to implement enterprise strategies

Cloud computing will eventually offer a complete managed haven of services for Big Data- software, Security, Processing, Storage, Hardware and Infrastructure. All are now in the offing. But in the near future, Knowledge as a Service is likely to presage the greatest change within the Future Enterprise ecosystem.

Real-time integration of disparate data and application methodologies is a key challenge here, with the current conventional multi-staged approach being- build a data warehouse to consolidate storage, then aggregate information sources  and then select a BI tool and then process user queries.  But this is already proving expensive, slow and error prone.

A number of innovative platforms are being developed in this sector based on enterprise information streaming models. These provide a virtual unified view of the data stream without first transferring it to a central repository and also point the way to the next step of fully autonomous tool selection and decision support.

 Future Shock

It is now clear that the global environment is placing place enormous pressure on all organisations, not just from a competitive perspective but from the need to upgrade ethical and sustainability standards. This will continue at an accelerating pace. The changing technological environment in particular is already disrupting entire service industries  e-commerce in particular- retailing, banking, trading and supply. Now a second wave of service industries- manufacturing, healthcare, education, media, advertising, legal, hospitality and travel is being turned upside down by the revolution.

In this revolution Big Data is acting as a major catalyst, offering the glittering prize of untold value-added, but will generate this cornuopia only if it is also agile and precisely targeted, meeting the specific needs of multiple domains. Specialised decision-making in finance, biology, medical, cosmological, pharmaceutical, government, media and legal applications will require different classes of algorithmic support. And even domain analytic specialists may soon be obsolete as expert domain algorithms generated from the ever expanding cumulative knowledge of the Web begin to dominate the decision process. Critically however such algorithms will need to be continuously verified and adapted within a shifting social and business environment.

Because of the rate of innovation and subsequent disruption, service-based systems will therefore need to be self-adaptive; applying intelligent algorithms to support new options as well as the growth of collaborative ventures involving multiple stakeholders, such as commonly occur in service industries such as Hospitality, Travel and Real Estate.

New technological innovations such as smartphones and tablets are also increasingly filling mobile gaps and shortfalls in existing services. For example, by starting to displace traditional credit card/banking in the lucrative payments market and enabling the personalisation of healthcare and educational services in remote areas.

Such upgrades in the service sector imply the use of increasingly pervasive Big Datasets with low access time latencies. Response timeframes are critical, with cumbersome reporting and query tools way too slow for today’s end user needs. So the days of manual intervention in the decision process are drawing to a close as global markets creating decisions involving hundreds of variables required instantly.

So the stage is set. The filtering, pattern matching and super-intelligent analytic processing required to make sense of the overload of big Data, will mean that human intervention in the decision process will inevitably become a significant bottleneck.

But the future smart enterprise must have the flexibility to focus and deploy its cooperative intelligence autonomously, at all levels of the organisation. This will be a proactive response to new opportunities and competitive pressures in the marketplace.

The level of volume and complexity of decision-making will continually and rapidly increase over time in response to the changing social, geopolitical and technological environment. The resulting network interactions involving customers, supply chains, services, markets and logistics will eventually make it impossible for humans to compete. It will become just too complex and time-consuming even for dedicated teams of humans to manage, just as it is impossible to control complex trading, production, marketing operations manually or chemical plants and space missions today. 

The IT centre will rapidly transform into tomorrow’s Knowledge Technology Centre- KT Centre. This will place further pressure on the need for real-time high quality decision-making.

By 2030 humans will become partners in enterprise decision processes powered by intelligent algorithms based on realtime knowledge outcomes plus research encapsulated in the Intelligent Web. But over time their input, as for airline pilots and fast train drivers today, will be largely symbolic.

Big Data therefore will have provided a major catalyst for an extreme makeover of the future enterprise, the business environment, for society and the planet.

 

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