Rotary Club Meeting – April 22, 2003

Written by David D. Buck

Jim Maslowski introduced our speaker, Jack Shaw, a specialist in bringing together businesses and information technology. Jack's books include Surviving the Digital Jungle (1999) and the forthcoming Autonomic Enterprise: Melding Business and Technology. Although the economy is currently in a recession, he believes that cost cutting did not work as means of corporate improvement during the 1990-1991 recession and will not work again. Since companies "cannot shrink to greatness" he urged concentrating on three basic features of the best businesses: quality, speed, and cost effectiveness. Jack believes that firms can create success by harnessing the most recent developments in information technology.

He described three developments that he believes can be used to improve large and small businesses over the next five or more years:

• The Virtual Office in which people will be able to teleconference with others in the same building, the same region, across the nation and throughout the world.
• XML web service meaning extendable markup language through which websites using different computer systems can be seamlessly linked. So a buyer contemplating a new purchase can-through web inquiry to a distributor-acquire full information both about availability at the distributor and gain full access the manufacturer's specifications for current production.
• Grid Computing in which it will be possible to access more easily shared data while increasing security for both buyers and sellers.

These changes grow out of the computing bandwidth explosion that enables computers to transfer huge amounts of data, many multiples of presently operating systems, within in few seconds.

Shaw trusts that current increases in communication capabilities will produce an even larger wave of innovation than in the past. He conceives that business operations increasingly will become “autonomic” or self-monitoring and self-sustaining. Thus, just as most of our bodily functions—lungs, heart, and digestion—are controlled by the autonomic nervous system, so basic business operations would function in the “autonomic enterprise.” He cited a New Jersey plastic gear maker with superb quality control whose factory runs twenty-four hours a day but requires staffing for only eight hours. Thus autonomic companies will no longer need to carry out much ordinary monitoring and accounting work, but can concentrate on maintaining the system and improving it.

HOME