Chapter 10. Conclusion

"This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Sir Winston Churchill

Having arrived at the end of our journey through the world of emerging and disruptive technologies, it's worth examining where we stand in the current evolution of information technology and how the next several years may impact our businesses. The outstanding question is whether or not the next five years will be as dramatic as the past five years in terms of the highs and lows of our expectations, business objectives and realities, and economic forecasts. We also need to know whether the next five years will bring increased business productivity from the application of technology or whether the gains have already been accomplished. Is the Internet technology wave just starting or has it already peaked? What were the lessons learned over the past several years and how can these be applied moving forward? Where can new forms of value be extracted and how should an organization position itself to gain competitive advantage? What is the future role and impact of technology for achieving competitive advantage? What is the next killer application and what is the timing of consumer and enterprise adoption?

I hope this book has demonstrated that we are just beginning to extract true business benefit from Internet-based technologies and applications. The technology is still relatively new on the scene and the past five or more years have been, for the most part, a learning period. We've learned what works and what doesn't work and have seen just a few companies and solutions really make it through the first hurdle. In the dot-com space, we've seen companies such as Amazon.com and eBay succeed. In the enterprise space, we've seen software packages such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management transform our businesses even if they haven't yet met expectations for returns. According to Ray Lane, a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and former President and Chief Operating Officer of Oracle Corporation, the next five years will give us a chance to go in and test these applications to see how well they are providing real business performance and functionality at lower cost. We've changed the way in which we deliver value to customers, suppliers, and business partners; now it is time to refine and optimize our model.

The next wave of technologies that I have outlined in this book represents what we might call round two of the Internet era. Technology companies have gone back in and refined how applications and business processes should really work when delivered over the Internet. The first wave of applications was essentially a forced fit on top of a powerful but vulnerable framework. This next wave of innovation will help to increase our confidence in conducting business electronically and also to create new ways for us to extract new forms of business value. It may be hard to predict the exact timing for adoption of some of these technologies such as mobile commerce or radio frequency identification, but they all serve as strategic enablers for us to create value and improve productivity. We are entering an era of combinations, an era where killer applications are built from combinations of killer technologies, where computers can start to serve their users rather than command their users, where information and transactions are able to move seamlessly across location boundaries, device boundaries, and physical and virtual boundaries. Users will be able to interact with applications from any place, on any device, via any interface whether it is a graphical interface or a spoken interface. Physical goods and assets will start to become part of the overall electronic fabric via electronic tagging and electronic product codes. There will be an exponential increase in the number of electronic transactions. These transactions will migrate from the human-to-machine interactions of today to a mass of interrelationships and interactions among people, devices, appliances, computers, and intelligent objects.

These long-term trends are taking place today. Developments in the emerging and disruptive technologies that we have profiled, together with many other technologies that were not included, will pave the way toward mass adoption. Each technology is gaining a certain degree of lift in terms of adoption from other synergistic technologies. Web services will help to lift mobile business, radio frequency identification will help to lift real-time computing, and grid computing will help to lift computing utilities. By extending the radar and detecting these patterns early, the enterprise can be in the best position to sense and respond. It has been said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Millions of people and thousands of companies are inventing the future every day. By extending the radar function within your business, you will be able to detect some of the most important innovations that are occurring in the outside world ahead of time and will be able to create a powerful window of opportunity to prepare and act faster than your competition.

Since we are entering the truly productive phase of the Internet technology evolution, it is important to reshape the historical technology adoption curve within your business. If you are a mainstream enterprise, you need to become more like an early adopter. If you are an early adopter, you need to become more like a pioneer. Think of it not as a first-mover advantage but a smart-mover advantage.

Today, more than ever, it is important to realize that emerging and disruptive technologies can yield as much if not far more business value than today's mainstream applications. They can also be implemented in conjunction with your existing enterprise information technology infrastructure. Emerging technologies can provide you with an edge on your competition. Disruptive technologies can fundamentally change the rules of the game both for your business and for your entire industry. Even in a back-to-basics economic climate, these technologies hold the secret both to revenue generation and to cost reduction and performance improvement. How prepared is your radar?