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	Discuss: Emerging Topics--the general FM discussion forum Topic: Ranking the Trends--from the FM Global Trends Survey

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michaelhopkins

FM Editor

Member Since:
06 Dec 2005
Posts:82

22 Mar 2006 6:23 PM

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RANKING THE TRENDS
Business impact vs. impact on an individual manager's life

Among the results of the FutureMonitor Global Trends Survey (see the complete results here) were rankings of a dozen named trends from two different perspectives--predictions of the trends' near-term impact on business overall and then predictions of the claim those same trends would exert on the attention of managers. There were some interesting differences in the two rankings.

The two sets of results:

Business Impact
Q: Trends ranked in order of "impact you think they will have on business over the next 2 to 5 years--from most impact to least. (The scores reflect their average placement rank. The closer to 1.0 a trend's average is, the higher it was ranked):

China--overhyped or underrated	4.0
Energy looming larger?	4.3
Boom(er) times--longer lives, livelier living	4.9
Information overload--extracting meaning from the noise	5.4
Connected, for better and worse (the future of digital security)	5.6
Compete? Or collaborate? (A 6.2 new source of advantage)	6.2
The reinvented organization (a revolution in how work gets done)	6.4
Design--the last best differentiator	6.6
Playing God (biotech's businessreach)	7.3
The death of commercials--the rise of...what?	8.6
That's you they're talking about (the rise of the blog)	8.9
It's all just a (video) game	9.7

Impact on Managerial Life
To assess predicted impact on each respondent’s working life, we asked him or her to name the one trend that would have the greatest impact. As you’ll see, there were a couple overwhelming lead choices.

Q: Now, thinking of yourself only, which one of the following trends do you think will have the largest impact on your working life over the next 2 to 5 years?

Information overload--extracting meaning from the noise	23%
The reinvented organization (a revolution in how work gets done)	19
Boom(er) times--longer lives, livelier living	13
Energy looming larger	13
China--overhyped or underrated	11
Connected, for better and worse (the future of digital security)	7
Compete? Or collaborate? (A new source of advantage)	6
Design--the last best differentiator	4
Playing God (biotech's business reach)	2
The death of commercials--the rise of...what?	2
That's you they're talking about (the rise of the blog)	1
It's all just a (video) game	0

Upshot: When survey respondents were asked to evaluate the managerial attention a trend claim, “information overload” got only the sixth highest rating. But later, when asked to rank what would specifically have greatest impact on themselves, they ranked it first--out of 12--nearly a quarter of the time. Make sense? The same might be said for “the reinvented organization”--which, in the independent trend evaluations, received the biggest downgrade between business impact and predicted future claims on managerial time. When ranked here, though, in terms of its impact on each individual respondent’s working life, it got almost one fifth of the first-place votes. Are respondents judging that other managers/workers are generally different from themselves?

chrismeyer

Member Since:
20 Dec 2005
Posts:33

11 Apr 2006 5:02 PM

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Maybe it will take a little more than two years--like three--but I think the impact of multiplayer on line games (MMOGs) is underrated here. In the past month, I've heard about not particularly hip VCs investing in an MMOG company, the new head of MIT's Media Lab saying MMOG's are the most important trend he's watching, and heard that Worlds of Warcraft (three months ago said to be at 4.5 million players worldwide, but I believe now closer to ten, and generating income for about one million Chinese who sell high-ranking identities) is developing a venture called Seriosity to do real work in an MMOG environment.Second Life--sort of MMOGs meet MySpace--is the forerunner of the next wave of shared social spaces, and is training people to blur the on-line/"rest of life" boundary by allowing your avatar to send emails and texts to real world addresses. These environments are a new medium, and we will find them used for politics, commerce, advertising, and of course social activities. And it may create an echo of the digital divide, between people comfortable expressing themselves through virtual representations and those who lock themselves out. If you happened to see the O'Reilly Factor excerpt linked by Howard Rheingold's post in the Death of TV discussion, and heard him ask "Why don't these kids just talk on the phone," you can only imagine his consternation at receiving communications from avatars.In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, most commerce takes place in the Metaverse--his blueprint is coming closer.

martynw

Member Since:
18 Apr 2006
Posts:1

18 Apr 2006 1:59 PM

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Maybe I'm missing something, but what impact will such online games have on the majority of the population in terms of banking and finance, manufacturing, distributing, and customer service.
I tend to think it will only be a sizeable but minority activity engaged in online social activities ?

Frymaster

Member Since:
23 Mar 2006
Posts:32

20 Apr 2006 2:02 AM

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For example, I'll tell my avatar, or representation of myself in the meta-verse or cyberspace, to "pay the bills today." My avatar has a list of passwords for internet accounts for my utilities, etc. It goes and collects the invoices and pays them according to my instructions or tendencies that the avatar "learns" over the course of monthly cycles. Eventually, it will ask me and then tell me "Time to pay the bills."

In manufacturing, a shipping manager's avatar would constantly be monitoring dozens or hundreds of shipments with real time GPS/RF-ID technology. The avatar alerts the real person only when something goes awry.

Plus, think about how this affects training of all kinds. Simulators are a breakthrough in high-cost training like, say, jet pilots, astronauts. Companies will assign new employees with an avatar that leads him/her through a series of training and testing to ensure comprehension and performance. Auto-customizable, it takes every learner through what they need the most and skims over what they need the least.

In customer service, you already see most rudimentary example in the semi-intelligent voices that lead customers through automated options. "I heard you say: 4 - 4 -3. Is that correct?"

Avatars never sleep, never get sick, never forget, and can keep track of way more stuff than a human.

chrismeyer

Member Since:
20 Dec 2005
Posts:33

20 Apr 2006 2:29 AM

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Frymaster proposes good examples, of which I'd guess training will be the first one to become truly mainstream (as I said, maybe three, not two, years.) The key point, MartinW, will be the "MMO", not the "G." People will start to become comfortable interacting as groups and individuals in a mixed "virtual life/rest of life" environment, opening up new ways to do business, just as the www opened up internet commerce as a new way to do business. People used to shop in shops; now they shop in websites; soon they'll shop in shared virtual environments.This suggests that just as the web has now become not just a way to shop, but to look for a job, plan travel, date, and conduct social activities (I mean to include all the Web 2.0 sharing/tagging stuff), all these things will move to a new, more immersive location, like going from black and white to color TV. Today's games are the little, out of the way application (from a macroeconomic standpoint) in which the technology gets good enough to disrupt what will then be the incumbents--Amazon, Google, eBay, etc. in more universal activities. Their significance is in developing and training people to use a new interface.

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