Achieving the digital manifest destiny

Citation

Brotman, S.N. (2003), "Achieving the digital manifest destiny", info, Vol. 5 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/info.2003.27205aab.001

Achieving the digital manifest destiny

Stuart N. Brotman(sbrotman@brotman.com) is President of Stuart N. Brotman Communications, a global management consulting firm based in Lexington, Massachusetts that advises domestic and international telecommunications, Internet, media, entertainment and sports industry clients. He also teaches telecommunications, entertainment and media law at Harvard Law School and serves as an Eisenhower Fellow.

Keywords: Communications technology, Cellular communications

Abstract The first wave of wonder over the promise of digital technology has long passed (the dot.com bubble now burst), leaving all of us to reckon with the consequences of the digital manifest destiny. Companies today understand that responding to the digital imperative means more than simply taking orders from a Web site or urging workers to make decisions faster, under the guise of Internet time. Reorganizing work in the digital economy means incorporating the technologies and their resultant capabilities into the heart of the value-adding process. Today, an integration of these technologies into the most basic ways of doing business is being seen. This digital manifest destiny is forcing all companies to compete on new criteria. It has accelerated the rate of change in products and markets, placed a greater premium on competing through knowledge work, and undermined the ability of leading companies to sustain their source of competitive advantage for too long. Until now, the digital manifest destiny has rippled through each element of the economy without the coordinated participation of what may be the key institutional player: the business community. While many large companies are responsible for developing and producing the technologies propelling the digital manifest destiny, the most important questions of how to support the ongoing change in the most productive manner have not been addressed. Until now, most businesses have responded to the consequences of our increasingly wired world in an ad hoc and reactive manner. Few have created a proactive, forward-looking plan. The lack of such a coordinated plan raises a critical issue. How can people shift from watching the continued digitization of everything in a hands-off manner, and begin to take positive steps to shape such progress more constructively? Business leaders must realize that the digital divide denotes a real phenomenon that will have a critical bearing on whether business in a knowledge-based economy will be able to fulfill its vast promise, both in the USA and around the world.

More than 150 years ago, leaders and politicians referred to the continental expansion of the USA as &#34"manifest destiny.&#34" This short and evocative phrase connoted more than simple westward expansion. Manifest destiny referred to an ideal, a sense of national mission and purpose. At a time of great social and technical change, US leaders believed that progress was inevitable, and that the country's expansion into uncharted territories emerged from the boundless progress in science and the arts. Entire manifest destiny described a changing social order, and represented the physical embodiment of growth, expansion, and modernity. It was not just an inevitable physical movement west, but also a cultural watershed of hope and optimism.

And so the metaphor applies today to digital expansion. Today, we also face a time of great social and technological change. And likewise, there is an inevitable change sweeping over both the visible and the invisible landscape. Because the nature of converting physical matter to information invariably links those data through networks, the inevitable push spreads throughout all areas. As journalist Jimmy Guterman recently wrote, &#34"Over the past 20 years technology has gone from merely changing the way Americans get through the day to defining our way of life.&#34"

For a dark proof of this argument, consider the role of our digital world in the wake of the tragic terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Let us set aside for a moment the role that such technologies as the Internet played in enabling the crippling attacks to take place. The striking evidence of technology's lasting impact came during and immediately after the attack. Could the terrorists have known that word of the World Trade Center collision, broadcast over television and radio to a rapt nation, was passed along cellular phones to hostages on board the flight diverted from DC; and that this information in all likelihood triggered several passengers to defend themselves? Their wireless link to friends and family in all likelihood led to the response that diverted the hijacked plane, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Another poignant reminder of technology's response to the attacks is found in those friends and family who received final words from their loved ones via cellular phones on the highest floors of the World Trade Center towers.

In the immediate moments following the attacks, digital networks once more helped re-form many of the human connections severed by them. Individuals who escaped tragedy reconnected with friends and family over cellular phones. Desperate individuals in need of information supplemented their television viewing with e-mail and Internet access. And, as the impact of the new world took hold among fearful Americans, and global citizens, people turned once more to the burgeoning electronic networks as the connective tissue remaking many of the critical personal and business ties shattered by the events. The most glaring evidence of this trend came in the sharp rise in videoconferencing, in response to the diminished physical travel. Remote business centers such as at Kinko's reported a sharp rise in teleconferencing services. And one top executive for a leading executive search firm reported that the firm had replaced the vast majority of its face-to-face client meetings with remote videoconferencing.

The scale and scope of the digital manifest destiny

Dark or light, good or bad, material or immaterial, the pace of digital change marches forward, gradually permeating every element of daily life.

More than half a billion people world-wide have access to computers and the Internet today. In the USA, according to recent census studies, more than 54 million households have at least one computer and more than 90 percent of students have access to the Internet through their schools. According to one recent academic study, there are now more than 550 billion documents available on the Web, with information growing at the rate of more than 7.3 million pages per day. Researchers Peter Lyman and Hal Varian at the School of Information Management Systems, University of California at Berkeley, peg the number of e-mails at more than 3.5 billion daily.

Businesses have been swept up in the digital revolution, conducting an increasing amount of transactions electronically. In the year 2000, according to the Gartner Group, an international market research firm, businesses traded about $400 billion over the Web. Gartner projects that this number will rise to $3.7 trillion in 2003. Forrester Research, another leading firm, projects the 2004 global e-commerce figure at $6.8 trillion. Consumers also are increasingly comfortable making purchases from their computers. During the 2001 holiday shopping season, for example, individuals spent more than $11 billion online during the last quarter. Amazon.com, the leading Web retailer, says that it sold more than 38 million items.

Our financial markets have been radically transformed by the continued digitization of commerce, as well. On the trading floors of Wall Street or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, traders now conduct transactions that were once logged on paper slips through hand-held wireless computers. Furthermore, the markets now conduct business through automated systems that have the capacity to handle more than a billion trades a day, a sum that dwarfs the capacity of even a decade ago.

The impact of the digital manifest destiny is felt not merely through vast numbers, however, but by vast changes in the daily lives of workers, students, and citizens. These changes range from the huge increase in electronic distance learning to the way in which traveling sales reps store their information on laptop or hand-held computers or PDAs tied into a company network. They include student musicians who now have the power to record and distribute their music digitally, or hobbyists who have the power to create robust communities for increasingly specialized passions through the Web. The spectacular rise of eBay, an online trading community, has created numerous electronic communities of like-minded traders and collectors who have expanded their networks into cyberspace. Digital tools and digital culture continue to spread into every aspect of daily life.

Indeed, the digital manifest destiny has crept into every corner of our economy. Just as the advent of electricity led to dramatic changes in how companies organized themselves and their work processes, all companies are realizing that they must implement the new information technologies at a fundamental level.

The consequences of connection

This digital manifest destiny is forcing businesses to reorganize themselves around the new technologies and changing the essential nature of doing business in ways we are only beginning to understand. In every industry and every market throughout the world, companies are considering how information and communications technology fundamentally changes the most basic ways in which they add value.

Business leaders today are reckoning with the fact that the impact of digital technology has not created a new &#34"Internet economy&#34" which has displaced traditional global markets; rather the current, and more substantial generation of technology adoption has altered the basic substance of business for established companies. In the remake of the sci-fi movie, The Fly, scientist Seth Brundle mistakenly fuses with a fly at the molecular level to become a new entity, one he ultimately calls &#34"Brundlefly.&#34" Today, we have such a new economic entity, one that fuses both old and new characteristics at a genetic level. Those who posited an entirely new world, say, entirely on the Internet (the dot.com boom at its height) missed the fact that old models and current economies will never be replaced by the digital world; rather they will be informed, animated, and ultimately powered by the digital wave. It is not a question of the transformation to an Internet Economy per se; but our current world transformed in total.

The first wave of wonder over the promise of digital technology has long passed (the dot.com bubble now burst), leaving all of us to reckon with the consequences of the digital manifest destiny. Companies today understand that responding to the digital imperative means more than simply taking orders from a Web site or urging workers to make decisions faster, under the guise of &#34"Internet time.&#34" Reorganizing work in the digital economy means incorporating the technologies – and their resultant capabilities – into the heart of the value-adding process. Today, we are seeing an integration of these technologies into the most basic ways of doing business.

For corporations, the grand hope of the technologies – the Internet, mobile telephony, communications satellites and the like – is that they will make better and stronger connections among suppliers, vendors and customers. Managers believe that these connections will foster a more productive, efficient, and synchronous way of work. Already, corporations have reorganized themselves significantly in response to the digital manifest destiny.

Those companies which have responded to the promise of the digital technologies are conducting business in fundamentally new ways. They are engaged in real-time transactions with customers and suppliers. They are creating and extracting more value from information about resources than the resources themselves. They are realizing more productivity from fewer employees as a result of redesigning workflows around the power of an integrated information system. They are gathering more, and better, information about the purchasing habits of customers. And they are becoming more adept at crafting strategy as a constantly shifting process rather than a long-term event.

This digital manifest destiny is forcing all companies to compete on new criteria. It has accelerated the rate of change in products and markets, placed a greater premium on competing through knowledge work, and undermined the ability of leading companies to sustain their source of competitive advantage for too long.

The dangers of the digital manifest destiny

So – are these changes beneficial? Surely this question has no simple answer. The digital manifest destiny creates as many negative consequences as it provides productivity and progress (no surprise, since the manifest destiny of the mid-1800s created adverse effects as expansion moved ahead at a brisk pace). There are always mixed blessings to new ways of work. Giving employees cell phones and mobile laptops may give them greater flexibility and autonomy in getting their work done; yet this ubiquity also carries the potential for work life to spill, inappropriately, into every aspect of one's personal life. The new power of computers to track behavior provides employees with great abilities to keep tabs on every element of individuals, with potential invasions of privacy. Sudden productivity surges due to information and communications technology investment can lead companies to shed commensurate amounts of employees. And the relentless march of new technologies continually raises the stakes for what employees need to learn. Finally, in terms of sheer stress factor, the pressure of needing to be available 24/7 is not trivial. Always rushing to make decisions, forever plugged into work, and constantly feeling threatened by new economic competitors only raise the fear factor for all.

The digital manifest destiny has created other new dangers. As we have seen recently, the power of the Internet to connect far-flung groups in a decentralized manner can be used for malevolent purposes, as in the case of the terrorist network that displayed a frightening digital capacity in planning the devastating 11 September attacks. The notion that all information should be free fails to take into account the consequences of connecting lethal information with groups who would use it for evil. In a broader sense, the continued spread of digital technologies threatens to exacerbate pre-existing gaps and tensions between developed and lesser-developed countries.

The business consequences are enormous. Consider the number of companies that have had to resort to job layoffs in recent years – among them such stalwarts as Cisco and Lucent – many of the most professional and innovative companies in the so-called New Economy. Gaps in the information infrastructure place these unemployed individuals at risk of falling behind, not simply in a linear fashion, but in a qualitative slide from the market's spiraling demands for competence. These people need to be able to return to the workforce without costly retraining and a long orientation to the constantly-shifting ways of work. Because digital technologies change the way we work almost as quickly as technology itself marches forward, rejoining the workforce is more like running up to and jumping on to a motor cycle than climbing on to a bus that has stopped conveniently for you. We are on this digital conveyor belt and when individuals step off – voluntarily or not – they cannot come back without some program to keep them limber.

The ripple effects of such spiraling demands play out throughout the economy. Without a cadre of workers who are trained and able to support an economic turnaround, the prospects for qualitative growth are severely limited. Without the workers who can handle the new jobs formed by healthy companies in the future, we will experience a deepening divide of enormous consequence.

Within corporations, managers are confronted with the many facets of a new digital imperative. Lower-skilled workers, for example, need sufficient training to participate in new forms of work. Layers of digital proficiency spanning high and low skilled employees must be bridged. The current trend towards remote and/or mobile and flexible employees must be supported through an individual's ability to tap into corporate network resources. Mobile and flexible employees, for example, who use technology to bridge their distance, must have adequate infrastructure for productive work. In the area of digital training, all employees must have the ability to upgrade their skills to keep pace with technology. To remain competitive, managers must boast sufficient digital prowess and resources to attract and retain employees. Finally, the notion of digital human capital goes beyond the walls of the corporation to include the key issue of preparing the workforce of the future. Today's workforce will slip further behind unless the educational system gets corporate help to prepare individuals to work with an ever-widening array of digital technologies.

Creating the digital dividend

Until now, the digital manifest destiny has rippled through each element of the economy without the coordinated participation of what may be the key institutional player: the business community. While many large companies are responsible for developing and producing the technologies propelling the digital manifest destiny, the most important questions of how to support the ongoing change in the most productive manner have not been addressed. Until now, most businesses have responded to the consequences of our increasingly wired world in an ad hoc and reactive manner. Few have created a proactive, forward-looking plan.

The lack of such a coordinated plan raises a critical issue. How can we shift from watching the continued digitization of everything in a hands-off manner, and begin to take positive steps to shape such progress more constructively? The question of what our new digital world will look like cannot be truly examined until we ask ourselves one vital question. How can the business community be the catalyst for this new digital destiny? How will the digital dividend unfold?

Business leaders must realize that the digital divide denotes a real phenomenon that will have a critical bearing on whether business in a knowledge-based economy will be able to fulfill its vast promise, both in the USA and around the world. As these new technologies and ways of connecting take shape, we have a choice before us: to take a purposeful and planned approach to realizing the promise of a digital world, or to step back and watch this brave new world emerge haphazardly.

The issue today concerning the digital divide is not only about offering Internet access to every citizen, nor is it only about social policy or computer penetration. The stakes are in fact much greater. The basic question that needs to inform every discussion of our digital future comes down to this: How do we begin to create an economic and social infrastructure that leverages the promise and potential that these new technologies offer?

Seeing this dynamic as an opportunity rather than a problem can help business and other civic leaders set about creating the digital dividend. I think of the digital dividend as the profound gains that both the business and the broader community will realize when the various digital networks under way reach their fullest potential. The digital dividend represents the payoff that will result when business leaders engage with policy makers to help the spread and convergence of information and communications technologies to take place better, quicker, and in a way that helps business – suppliers and customers alike.

Creating the digital dividend will enable businesses to thrive at a new level of post-industrial innovation. Given that information has become integral to the value-chain of business today, the real challenge lies in creating a network of networks that puts digital knowledge at its core. This is not just social policy, an issue of digital equity, access for all. This issue is larger, encompassing individuals and corporations, realizing the full promise of digital technology in a complex interconnected world.

To realize this great promise, we must look to active leadership and involvement from the business community. Many based in the policy world call for top-down federal government solutions as remedies. Yet there is a growing consensus that getting beyond the digital divide will require strong initiatives by the business community to create a digital dividend – whether by its own initiatives or by leveraging financial incentives and resources provided by the public sector.

In order to realize the digital dividend, the business community must engage with the world of policy, and vice versa. A new compact must be formed. The policy community has long promoted the concept of &#34"universal service&#34" to ensure that income and geography are not insurmountable barriers to telecommunications access. The business community recognizes the economic efficiency of having as many people connected as possible but looks to the bottom line, rather than social policy, as the rationale for supporting digital network expansion. When these two principles are viewed in tandem, they comprise a larger equation – one that can generate exponential growth in digital technology penetration by virtue of both government support and private investment.

It is possible that all of this could happen organically, but not likely. And in fact we cannot afford to justify inaction in the name of market forces or technological imperatives. The digital manifest destiny requires a concerted effort by business and policy leaders to realize the full benefits for all parties. That is the way we achieved the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century. And, as the digital manifest destiny of the twenty-first century takes hold, we should be prepared to use that road-map in new and creative ways to transform promising developments into global realities.