Business 2001.

• Author: Young, John A.
• Position: Information technology's impact on the business world - Information Management

Wondering how your job may change in the next decade, compliments of information technology? Here's a glimpse into your future.

Technology is a very abstract word. I define it as science put to work. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow credits technology advances with creating more than half of the productivity advances in the U.S. in the last half century.

But where is technology heading? What kind of world are we creating?

Many people wonder if the information technology industry is mature. Growth has slowed in recent years. We've become such a large portion of capital spending--38 percent of producers' durable equipment in the U.S.--and our growth rates are much more closely tied to capital spending, give or take a percentage point or two.

Despite that, I believe technology will see more change in the decade ahead than in the previous 30 years. People have talked about the Information Age for a long time. In the 1990s, it will arrive.

LIKE LAMPS INTO AN OUTLET

At Hewlett-Packard, we see three important technological trends, all occurring simultaneously, which makes the effect that much more powerful:

* Technology performance is accelerating. The best example is compute power. Reduced instruction set computing, or RISC, combined with improved device technology, allows us to provide 50 to 75 percent more performance for a dollar's worth of computer every year. Other improvements are in the capacity of fiber optic fibers and the density of storage technology.

So far, the information industry hasn't done a great job of producing the software applications for people to take advantage of the better hardware technology, but that problem should be solved by the end of the decade with computer-aided software engineering tools, reusable software objects, new user interfaces and expert systems.

* An "information utility" will be developed. This is being driven by the movement of telecommunications to digital technology and the convergence of data communications, telecommunications and broadcasting.

The information utility will be a public infrastructure as widespread as electricity, an intelligent network of networks stacked with services, such as intelligent directories, the Library of Congress online, the expertise of the world's best doctors. You name it.

Of course, we'll need standards for interfacing with and operating this information utility, and those standards must be worldwide.

Advances in wireless technology will extend this...