HIGH TECH, NO TECH AND CAREER TECH

HIGH TECH, NO TECH AND CAREER TECH

THREE PATHS TO THE FUTURE THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY TIMES

David Pearce Snyder

Consulting Futurist

to the

Manitoba Advanced Education and Training

Technical Vocational Education Conference

Winnipeg, Manitoba

March 10, 2006

©David Pearce Snyder • The Snyder Family Enterprise • www.the-futurist.com

8628 Garfield Street, Bethesda, MD 20817 • phone: 301-530-5807 • david@the-futurist.com

to be delivered to the Manitoba Technical Vocational Education Conference • March 10, 2006

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actually serve as a drag on economic performance, causing productivity improvement rates to

stagnate and prosperity to fall.

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• GROUPWARE - Peer-to-Peer file-sharing [P2P], Instant Messaging [IM],

Web Logs [Blogs] & Wikis [Wikis] make all work more collaborative,

collegial, efficient and productive.

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• Hardware and software 10% of costs

• Training 20% of costs

• Organizational restructuring, process

re-engineering and job redesign 70% of costs

D. SO. . . adding to computers to a traditional, authoritarian, hierarchical, compartmentalized

institution would appear to be about as purposeful as adding sparkplugs to a steam engine.

Clearly, to get the maximum value from IT, we will have to re-invent our institutions!

But how?

IV. POST-INDUSTRIAL PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION

A. COASE’s LAW: “The cost of gathering information determines the size of

organizations.”

[Prof. Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm – a lecture to the

College of Economics and Commerce, Dundee, Scotland, 1932]

Throughout most of the 20th Century, inter-organizational communication was slow,

expensive and time-consuming, leading most large organizations to be “vertically

integrated” and self-sufficient.

But, as the Internet has made communications fast, cheap and convenient, large enterprises

have begun to outsource non-mission critical overhead activities to superior specialist

suppliers, while concentrating resources and management attention on their core

competitive competencies.

[Dr. Coase was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics for his 1932

insight, and the resulting notoriety helped launch the outsourcing revolution.]

B. Organizational Efficiencies – Since information gathering costs determine the size and

“contents” of an organization – as the Internet makes it easier for organizations to find and

partner with suppliers who are able to provide higher quality/ lower cost services than those

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to be delivered to the Manitoba Technical Vocational Education Conference • March 10, 2006

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= GV The Global Village -- a single electronic marketplace

where 1/3 of the world’s population and ALL of the

world’s businesses will be able to engage in commerce

by 2010 – 2012

B. NOW THAT THE GLOBAL INFO-STRUCTURE IS IN PLACE . .

• Because human resources average 65% to 75% of business operating costs in mature

industrial countries, labor-intensive production - especially labor-intensive information work

– can increasingly be expected to migrate from high labor cost countries to low labor cost

countries.

• Over time, direct international competition in the international electronic marketplace by

producers of information products and services will gradually drive labor markets worldwide

to pay comparable wages for comparable work.

• Increasingly, in order to earn significantly more than the comparable global wage, U.S.

rank and file workers will have to add incomparable value on the job.

C. This moment in time . . .

History indicates that our transitioning industrial economies will eventually create a large new

class of middle-income jobs. BUT, this has not yet begun to happen! Until it does,

automation, info-mation, outsourcing and off-shoring will continue to reduce the numbers of

middle-income jobs in Europe, North America and Japan.

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Schumpeter once described as “a wave of creative destruction!”

E. THE MATURE INDUSTRIAL ECONOMIES ARE CURRENTLY IN, OR

APPROACHING, THE “TROUGH” OF SCHUMPETER’S “WAVE.

VANISHING MEDIAN INCOME JOBS

Old Education’s Failure or New Economic Structure?

E. THE MATURE INDUSTRIAL ECONOMIES ARE CURRENTLY IN, OR

APPROACHING, THE “TROUGH” OF SCHUMPETER’S “WAVE.”

VANISHING MEDIAN INCOME JOBS

Old Education’s Failure or New Economic Structure?

“It is changes in the quality of jobs, not a shortage of higher order worker skills, that explains

the growth of wage inequality. Service sector employment requires higher average skills but

pays lower average wages than manufacturing or other male-dominated jobs in primary

industries. The resulting misdirected public policy debate has generated a level of concern

over worker skills that is disproportionate to that warranted by a sober assessment of the

evidence.”

[Michael Handel, Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch, Economic Policy Institute, 2005]

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throughout business (Lockheed-Martin, IBM), and gaining currency in government,

especially for inter-organizational work teams (NASA, DoD).

•INSTANT MESSAGING (IM) – A real-time variation of e-mail for immediate

communication among two or more people who are on-line; use of IM has dramatically

reduced long-distance business telephone call volumes and is quickly turning cyberspace

into a “virtual bull pen.” Since 2000, IM has become the fastest-adopted technical

innovation in the history of U.S. business; 84% of large North American firms report

making formal use of IM by December, 2003 (Nasaw 2003). In 2005, IM’s original textmessaging

capabilities were augmented to include instant video-conferencing.

(It should be noted that the unusually rapid assimilation of IM by business has not been

the result of management initiative, but was almost entirely due to IM’s mass adoption by

millions of rank-and-file employees across many industries and professions. IMing has

universal appeal because it is an unusually efficient communications medium: fast, easy

to use and – like most groupware – down-loadable free from the Internet. Meanwhile,

young people on both sides of the Atlantic have also been quick to adopt IM for – among

other things – cheating on tests in school.)

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service, Web logs also loom large as future gatherers of market research, as a powerful

news medium, and an unusually effective teaching/training tool.

•WIKIS – Freely down-loadable software for collaboratively creating new knowledge bases

– dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopedias, etc. – for previously un-examined issues, problems

or fields of study (TWiki.org; Wikipedia.com). The need for such systems will increase

exponentially throughout the foreseeable future, as the accelerated expansion of human

knowledge – made possible by our rapidly-spreading use of IT – forces us to study new

problems, apply new technologies and explore new options.

B. THE MOST IMPORTANT NEW RULES –

• SIX EMERGENT SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES of the information economy

• Open Knowledge – 1985

• Open Source Software (OSS) – 1991

• Communities of Practice (CoPs) – 1998

• Open Innovation – 2002

• Embedded Learning – 2004

• Rank & File R&D (RF/RD) – 2004

• COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE (CoPs)

Most productive employees maintain a “community of practice,” an informal personal

network of peers – present and former co-workers, former supervisors, teachers, and classmates,

plus friends and family members, etc. – whom they can call on to validate and

augment their personal workplace knowledge and judgment. Their employees’

communities of practice will be crucial to all organizations’ abilities to master changing

realities and to deal effectively with innovation on the job.

• A “TECH-KNOW-LOGIC” ECONOMY

“A world of accelerating change will call for a workplace in which EVERYONE must be

attuned to the consequences of innovation – not only to be responsive to the unintended

impacts that will inevitably arise from our intentional actions (N.B. Edward Tenner’s “law

of unintended consequences”), but also to the rapidly-expanding body of human knowledge

generated by the pervasive, ubiquitous use of IT – forcing us to ask new questions, study

new problems and explore new options.”

[“Extra-Preneurship,” David Pearce Snyder, The Futurist, July/Aug 2005]

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Co-op, Community Service, Lab Research, etc

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avg. 3.4% increase in output for a 10% increase in expenditure for

new plant & equipment.

to be delivered to the Manitoba Technical Vocational Education Conference • March 10, 2006

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institutions to meet those goals

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all, you are not afraid of computers in the classroom; you have embraced them.

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