Introduction

he third modern information revolution has already had extensive impacts on business, commerce, and the services, but we have only seen the beginning stages of the changes which may be induced by the new technologies of the Information Age. In Part Two, seven articles explore the dimensions of these changes in business and commerce, the media, medicine, and education.

The first article, Robert Segal’s "The Coming Electronics Commerce (R)evolution," posits that new information and communication technologies are revolutionizing business and commerce in an evolutionary way. It asserts that a viable electronic commerce system requires five elements: a secure network linking buyers and sellers, a database replete with product information, easy-to-use buyer/seller interface software, reliable e-mail, and a mechanism for shipping, financing, and processing orders. It argues that electronic commerce networks will change the fundamental structure of how businesses distribute goods, products, and services, with three key issues being of paramount importance: who will run electronic commerce networks, how will electronic commerce change the structure of distribution, and who will the winners and losers be. Not surprisingly, "The Coming Electronic Commerce (R)evolution" concludes that those manufacturers, wholesalers, dealers, and end users who fail to grasp that the inventory-based model of doing business has been replaced by an information-based model will be doomed to extinction.

In the second article in this volume, "Electronic Commerce: Implications of the Internet for Business Practice and Strategy," Ajit Kambil examines the implications of the Internet and other technologies of the information revolution for business practice and strategy at the firm level. Kambil maintains that the new and emerging technologies will drive transaction costs sharply downward. Because of this, firms will have to reconfigure their organization, increase their agility in responding to opportunities and threats presented by low-cost communications, and be able to reconfigure market strategy on short notice. Therefore, Kambil argues, business managers must recognize that new and emerging information and communication technologies are creating a commercial environment significantly different than that which existed in the past; customize promotions and organizations interfaces to multiple distribution channels and media segments; and integrate marketing strategies across media. Existing firms, Kambil concludes, may not be able to do this well.

The brave new world of electronic commerce will also have—and is already having—an immense impact on the banking industry. Joanna Smith Bers makes this abundantly clear in her article, "Banking and Cyberspace: The New Promised Land," which asserts that electronic commerce will enable banks both to off-load some of their transaction-oriented retail business and to tap into a potentially vast financial services market. Nevertheless, Bers says, banks will still have to cope with state regulations on interstate banking transactions. At the same time, Bers continues, banks will have to develop relationships with software developers or risk the probability that software developers and other non-financial institutions will come between banks and their customers. Indeed, Bers warns, electronic commerce will force banks to reinvent the entire business of banking, as Bank of America and NationsBank began to do when they purchased MECA Software. Home banking, already in place in many locations, is another manifestation of electronic commerce’s invasion of banking, and various forms of electronic payment and electronic cash with all of their requirements for fool-proof security are coming online as well. As Bers makes clear, banks will still be integral parts of business and commerce in the Information Age, but they will be considerably different than they have been or are today.

Today’s media is already considerably different than that of a few years ago, and tomorrow’s media will be even more different, or so a variety of different journalists and media technologists assert in the fourth article in this volume, "Silicon Summit: Will Technology Affect the News?" The journalists and technologists identified five ways in which new information aand communication technologies and the news will interact: (1) News will be one of the significant factors influencing the adoption of new technologies; (2) consumer choice and control will drive journalism’s successful adaptation to new media; (3) news content will not remain the exclusive domain of traditional news organizations; (4) news professionals should learn to exploit the natural tension between the technical "possibilities" and the economic realities of new media; and (5) as online information gathering proliferates from the kindergarten classroom to the company cubicle, its "futuristic" perception will give way to greater comfort levels and thus increased audience acceptance of new-media news.

But the journalists and technologists did not agree about everything. For example, some saw the Internet as being a vehicle through which the masses' faith in the media can be restored, but others saw the Internet as providing too much information to ever be useful as a masses-oriented news medium. The journalists and technologists also raised questions about the validity of information that will be reported on the new technologies; with so much information available from so many sources, how is one to judge its validity? Despite their disagreements, however, all were united in the view that even in the Information Age, accurate news and information will be vital for the continuation of political democracy and democratic institutions.

Enrico Coiera next explores the application of information and communication technology to medicine in his article "Medical Informatics." Coiera observes that in medicine, information and communication technologies must be used to solve problems; they can not be used simply for the purpose of applying technology. Defining telemedicine as "the communication of information to facilitate clinical care," Coiera catalogues the ways that information and communication technologies are improving and might improve health care. He also poses several questions that come out of the application of these technologies to medicine. Coiera notes that there are problems with telemedicine, not the least of which is the need for the development of a protocol-based decision support system and common terminologies so that the advantages of new technologies may be more fully realized.

The last two articles in this volume examine the impacts of the Information Age on education. In "School Reform in the Information Age," Howard Mehlinger predicts that inevitably, the new technologies will be used extensively in schools, but stops short of prognosticating how they will be used. Students want to use technology, parents want their children to have access to it, and many teachers want to use it as well.

But Mehlinger is not naive. He cautions that the new technologies will require large amounts of money, and that there are some who want the technological revolution in schools to fail so that traditional ways of learning and teaching will survive. Mehlinger stresses that it has never been easy for schools to change, and that schools and teachers must come to terms with the reality that the emerging information and communication technologies are all potentially under the control of the learners. If schools and teachers do not recognize this elementary fact of the Information Age, Mehlinger warns, then learners will bypass and ignore them.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, the authors of the final article, "Universities in the Digital Age," concentrate on the impact of emerging technologies on colleges and universities. Observing that programs and practices at colleges and universites have changed little even though campuses are "rife with computers," Brown and Duguid postulate that the new technologies provide institutions of higher education the opportunity to move beyond traditional teaching and learning protocols to establish true "knowledge communities" that reach beyond campuses and academic communities. Colleges and universities play important roles in today’s society, the authors argue, including not only "educating," but also "credentialing." And beyond these tasks, colleges and universities also introduce students in different ways to "communities of practice" that they will find useful in later life. All these tasks are important, the authors assert, but one of the dangers of using the new technologies in higher education is that as "space and time" are overcome by "distance learning," the introduuction of students to "communities of practice" will be lost.

Recognizing that traditional universities will continue to exist, Brown and Duguid propose to develop alternative configurations to traditional colleges and universities so that the benefits of the new technologies can be realized without the loss of communities of practice. To do this, the authors propose the creation of "degree-granting bodies" (DGBs) centered around specific areas of practice and inquiry. These DGBs would consist of students, practitioners, faculty, and administrators linked by advanced information and communication technologies that would have as their objective providing learners "access to authentic communities of learning, exploration, and knowledge creation," "resources to help them work in both distal and local communities," and "widely accepted representation for work done." If this model is adopted, Brown and Duguid suggest, campuses might look very similar to the way they look today, but "a student's university career...would no longer be through a particular place, time, or pre-selected body of academics, but through a network principally of the student’s own making, yet shaped by a DGB and its faculty."

Across the spectrum of human activity examined here—in business and commerce, the media, medicine, and education—it is evident that the technologies of the Information Age have potential to significantly alter human activities and actions as well as organizational structures and practices. It is not always clear what the direction of change will be.

| Anthology Index | Chapter 7 | Part Three |