Keep Up With Technology or Die (Metaphorically, Of Course)

Doc likes to keep up with the latest and greatest, but I'm not obsessed by it.  Seems I might be if I was running a business. Business leaders are expecting wrenching change to their industry sectors in the future, due to the impacts of technology, according to the latest executive summary by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The research, set for full release in March 2012, reveals more than one third (37 percent) of leaders surveyed believe their organization will be unable to keep up with technology and they will lose their competitive edge. One third of IT industry leaders believe their businesses will disappear altogether, while six out of ten survey respondents believe the markets where they operate will be significantly altered between now and 2020, bearing little similarity to today.

Business structures are also likely to change - 63 percent predict a shift to decentralized structures with a far-reaching devolution of business decision-making authority move to the periphery of organizations. Adding to this, they believe that customers will generate almost as many new ideas for the improvement of business processes as employees. And by 2020, customers will generate the most new product or service ideas.

In addition, 59 percent of those surveyed agree that the concept of non-digital information will be utterly foreign to most employees by 2020.

The research, undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Ricoh, is the most comprehensive analysis to date on the impact of technology on the future workplace, and was developed through dedicated interviews with 567 senior business leaders across the globe within 20 sectors. Forty-six percent of respondents hold C-suite positions, with 43 percent earning annual revenues of US$500 million or more.

The executive summary can be downloaded here. Doc is not surprised to learn that employees and customers are the best sources of new business ideas – those are the folks on the front lines. But non-digital information being "utterly foreign" to employees? Not so convinced on that point. Won't people be talking to each other in 2020?