DOING BUSINESS IN AN INFO-MATED WORLD

A Strategic Briefing

David Pearce Snyder

Consulting Futurist

Today, a wave of technologic and organizational transformation is rolling across the world's industrial economies. North America, first to experience these forces of creative destruction, has now passed through the mid-point of a half-century's transition from labor-intensive to information-intensive operations. After more than twenty years of slowing economic growth, falling real wages, rising public and private debt and a shrinking social safety net, new information-based business is now enabling the U.S. economy to create twice as many middle and upper income jobs each year as low income jobs, while rising productivity is permitting wages and benefits to rise for all types of workers without inflation.

Economic historians tell us that, when a new technology finally matures, it immediately makes possible a cornucopia of new products and services that typically produce a sustained prosperity of a quarter century or more. In the U.S., electronic information technology has finally become so powerful, and our capacity to use it has become so productive, that cashless commerce, ticketless travel and paperless offices will be commonplace in less than a decade, as will chatty conversational computers that will help us spot customer trends, design customized products, train new employees and help customers shop. And, of course, more shopping will take place in cyberspace.

Futurist David Pearce Snyder will conduct a guided tour of the decade ahead, describing in detail the avalanche of info-com innovations that will transform the relationship between individuals and institutions, and revolutionize all global enterprise, from farms and factories to banks and boutiques, transforming both where and how people work, shop and live around the world.

©2000 David Pearce Snyder

The Snyder Family Enterprise

8628 Garfield Street

Bethesda, MD 208187-6704

phone: 301-530-5807

snyderfam1@AOL.com