The accelerating development of technology is placing increasing strains on traditionally structured organisations. The old vertically integrated industrial giants are experiencing great difficulty in operating, competing and surviving. To be successful in the next century, companies will have to drastically alter their structure and mode of operation. The speed with which this will occur will depend critically on the availability and cost of future telecommunications services. In this paper the technology drivers, interaction between companies and communications operators, and the resultant services. are discussed.

1. INTRODUCTION The world is undergoing a major globalisation with a restructuring of the Fordist production process and a fracturing and dispersion of all of the sub-processes across national boundaries. Realisation of an integrated structure will require communications systems to provide the 'glue' essential for global co-ordination. As a result modern companies are coming under increasing pressure to rethink their operations in order to position themselves well in the new competitive era. This means a faster delivery to the customer of better products, of increasing sophistication, at lower cost, on demand.

Common features of the evolving industries are

• Shorter product cycles - to provide a faster response to market and technological change.
• Increasing development costs for new products - carrying greater risks, but the potential for greater rewards.

As the competitive environment reduces the time to take action, faster decision making will be essential, requiring the intelligent processing of more data, under conditions of growing information pollution. All of this is underpinned by advances in communication and computer technology within legislative and policy frameworks which may allow or restrict such technology advantages.

2. MARKET DYNAMICS
The US provides an interesting perspective on the important interrelations between the evolution of communications and the economy. In figure 1, GDP growth, consumer price (CP) and communication company dynamics are plotted for the past two centuries. Both the GDP and CP have exhibited broad 'cycles' of about 50 year duration, with a successive ratcheting between accelerating and decelerating growth/ prices. During this evolution, the telegraph, telephone and radio have come into existence, leading to the generation of numerous companies, growth of which have been particularly spectacular induring periods of competitive evolution. The US is now entering a third communications age, dominated not by a single medium (eg. telephone) but by a diversity of competing media. This new age of communications will be challenging not only from the point of view of technology but also from that of the US economy. The key point is that if advancing technology is to prove itself worthwhile to the US economy, it must be harnessed in such a way that productivity (as reflected in the GDP) is improved.

Fig 1 shows that at the start of the century, the massive restructuring of the telephony sector was not able to arrest the decline in growth of the US economy. With the imminent burgeoning of the number of communications companies under a regime of intense competition and globalisation, the ways in which communications are harnessed to restructure the US and other economies into a mode of increased growth will prove challenging. Communications services will be critical for all sectors of the global economy.

3. TECHNOLOGY
With the imminent convergence of IT, entertainment and telecommunications a new world of opportunities is emerging. For example:

• Telepresence displacing travel,
• Increasing telecommunications mobility,
• Natural language recognition and machine I/O + conversation,
• Automatic language translation,
• Humanised interfaces to machines - everyone will become computer literate,
• Integrated terminals for work and pleasure - HiFi, TV, VR, PC, Mobile IT,
• The super Computer on your desk (wrist) - by 2010 the PC will be 1000 to 1000 000 times more powerful than that of today,
• Computers you wear - communication and computing on the move,
• Intelligent office with data sorting, visualisation, filtering, decision support, search - find - classify - anticipate - war games/simulation support.
• Mobile Medicare - real time monitoring of your health metrics - is your job, office, work, company killing you?

Such advances will require the rethinking of organisational structure and processes.

4. VALUE NETWORKS
The emergence of an integrated global economic structure will play havoc with conventional national markets. Instead of national markets feeding into international markets, the global market will influence national structures. This will cause considerable disruption. Existing value chains will become less static and disordered value networks will take their place. Such networks will be dynamic, having many complex features, such as cross or floating links, reflecting the evolving market structure. These will be made even more complex through greater cultural mixing of business and management styles and the need for new forms of taxation for global companies. Company structure and operations will have to mirror this dynamic environment. Communications will play an essential role in enabling companies to respond effectively in a dynamic, real-time economy in which the unifying managerial resource is information. The vertically integrated company, characteristic of much of current industry, will become less viable. One process leading to the demise of older structures is the inability of companies to retain strategic information as the convergence of industries necessitates increasing collaboration; already we see companies collaborating in one sector whilst competing (with different partners) in another.

5. VIRTUAL ORGANISATIONS
The new companies will be product and service-based with different organisations contributing complementary skills. Unified companies could disappear and become primarily contracting organisations with manufacturing, R&D, marketing etc run as separate profit centres, offering services competitively to parent or rival companies. Departments brought together to produce a specific product would form a 'virtual company' linked, not by geographic proximity, but by the global communications network which permits the low cost transfer of ideas and knowledge. This mode of working is already evident in the software industry and echoes earlier developments in electronics manufacture.

As the virtual company becomes more common, we could see specialised companies dominating particular activities such as design, planning, marketing etc., or situations where companies, employing a small core of workers and wielding tremendous financial power, hire design, planning and manufacturing capacity, on a world basis, to create their own products. This could be particularly important as the 'means of production' shifts from the owner of production tools to the owner of the knowledge to control those tools - the information worker.

In an even more extreme form, the 'virtual company' could employ, on short-term contracts, knowledge workers to develop specific products or services. There will be increasing numbers of temporary niche companies or specialisms taking advantage of ephemeral structures in the value networks. To be effective, such operations require vastly better communications than are available at present, enabling geographically separated people to interact closely and co-ordinate their efforts.

One of the stages towards this more integrative but distributed global operation is the transition of major companies to flatter and more fluid organisational structures with multi-directional information flows. Such structures may only be temporary as the market-place is driven further into disequilibrium; it is unclear what types of organisational structure may be viable under such extreme conditions. It is also unclear what regulatory and legislative frameworks will best suit the requirements of this global economy, characterised by intense competition and widespread corporate restructuring.

6. IMPACT
The impact of these radical changes is profound. As the global competitive process stimulates atomisation of companies and institutions, counteracting, cohesive processes such as co-operation between companies and nations, and increasing emphasis on business ethics, will be mandatory for maintaining global stability. Where businesses fail to meet these needs, they will be faced with increased environmental regulation and governmental control. Such cohesion can be enhanced through:

• more rational/ democratic self regulation of companies
• communication

referenda, televoting, etc This globally competitive environment, reliant on inter-working communication networks, will depend critically on co-operation between competitors. The ground-rules for operation in the market-place will evolve, perhaps exhibiting many radical changes. However, there are certain attributes which successful players will have to develop:

• engineer competitive edge through applied creativity
• ability to assess and take advantage of opportunities and risks

These changes will have an extensive impact on the lives of individuals who will no longer expect or be provided with jobs for life as companies make increasing use of contractors. The future working environment will demand people prepared to continue learning and developing throughout their lives. Individuals will have to develop their own strategies for coping with this demanding environment in which multi-tasking will become common-place. Many people will become both employers and employees.

7. COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
The imminent development of many novel aspects of optical technology (e.g, fibre amplifiers, soliton systems) to a commercially realisable form will change the course of telecommunications as we approach the next century, stimulating radical and fundamental changes in systems and networks. The release of fibre bandwidth will bring about the realisation of the "transmission engineer's dream" of: near infinite bandwidth; near zero physical space; near zero material requirement; near zero power consumption; all at near zero cost.

The key element to this dream is optical path transparency through the use of photonic amplifying devices (semiconductor and fibre) and photonic switching which overcomes the electronic traffic bottle-necks that would otherwise result as the enormous capacity of fibre releases the latent demand for communication. Radically new forms of telecommunication networks - well beyond the simple point to point systems that exist today - will be possible, with a progressive migration of intelligence, control and service creation towards the customer and terminal equipment. Further migration into the realm of non-linear optics for devices, fibre, systems and networks opens yet a further level of exploitation that is likely to eclipse the progress of telecommunications technology and services experienced so far. However, optical technology is likely to have to compete with the latest military innovations which may migrate into the commercial area as a result of the so-called 'peace dividend'. Not only is there competition between firms, there is competition between technologies.

Probably the most radical commercial changes in the 21st century resulting from the further advance of optical technology will be associated with the introduction of new services, the realisation that distance and bandwidth will be irrelevant - service and time will become the measures for charging, services migrating to the periphery of networks, local calls extending across complete countries and perhaps spanning all of Europe or North America, and ultimately the globe.

The emergence of low-cost, high bandwidth telecommunications coupled with the convergence of the information and communications sectors will provide an opportunity to synthesize disparate technologies to create new environments in which people can live and work. Some examples are described here.

7.1. Future Desk
The desk shown in Fig 2 can be realised with available technology integrated to satisfy our currently known, well defined requirements for human orientated interfaces. The main features of the desk are as follows.

Video Conferencing: Effective videoconferencing will be the essential team-working media for geographically dispersed organisations. Current desktop computer systems suffer from constrained bandwidth, producing small images and visual anomalies which limit the potential of the system. To improve and humanise videoconferencing, wider bandwidth can be provided, along with a large rear projected monitor (Fig 3) producing high definition life-size images in front of the user (in a natural face-to-face mode). Using an LCD shutter as the screen, a video camera can be aligned to be looking directly at the user. This enables eye contact and gaze awareness. The High Definition display can also be used as a computer monitor for application mixing, videoconferencing and computer generated data as well as an electronic whiteboard (Fig 4).

Hands in the Screen: The addition of an overhead camera, scanning the desk's surface, and producing a positional image of the user's hand ("or finger worn" 3D RF positioning sensors) allows the realisation of an economic "hands-in-the-screen" interface (Fig 5) for the direct hand control and manipulation of objects. No keyboard or mouse control is necessary; just speak the text and then "grab it" and put it where you want it.

3D Visualisation: A "hands in screen interface" enables manipulation of both data and virtual objects which may react emotionally to give heuristic guidance during interactive sessions. For example: icons try to avoid your hand if the action is questionable, or become defensive if you are about to initiate a damaging action.

Office Wiring: A major office limitation is the necessity for hard wired desks. Optical wireless affords a novel means of mobile communication inside the office. The bandwidth of the channel is potentially as broad as cable based optical fibre systems, thereby allowing broadband multi-channel services. Using transceivers with holographic dispersers to illuminate well defined cells, different data domains can be accurately positioned and addressed within the office environment (Fig 6).

7.2. Virtual Conference Rooms
Human behaviour in a real (single location) conference facility reveals a number of important requirements for maximising the usefulness of any meeting. To optimise the effectiveness of videoconferencing, we attempt to mimic this environment by providing a facsimile representation - a 'virtual' conference room'

Video windows have been developed over the last 15 years to a point where all the components are available as commercial products. Ideally, human beings are presented in real size on a high definition projection TV screen, as shown in Fig 7. By suitably arranging furniture and decor, the illusion of a continuous room or meeting-place can be created. Moreover, using electronic processing and steerable microphones, it is possible to focus the acoustics on any one speaker and arrange for his voice to emanate from the appropriate part of the image.

Electronic White Board: The white board or flip-chart facility is currently lacking, or poorly realised, in teleconferencing. The solution is an electronic white board which allows people at remote sites to interact as if they were sharing the same board (Fig 8). Writing and drawings on one electronic white board appear on all other boards to which it is linked. Erasures by any of the users of linked electronic white boards is also possible. In one implementation, an image of the human being at the distant end is superimposed on the screen to increase the sense of personal interaction.

Instant Fax: The ability to pass documents across the table during a meeting is essential for effective communication. In the tele-environment this may be realised in the manner shown in Fig 8 with a wide band fax able to relay details effectively across the table instantaneously. The bandwidth requirement for this facility is only 240 kbit/s.

The Phone-Box of the Future: Facilities of the kind described above will be costly at first and companies may be unwilling, or unable, to make the necessary investment. Consequently, there will be an opportunity for third parties to provide such facilities as a service. Obvious candidates would be hotels, who already provide seminar rooms and conference facilities for businesses. Just as in former times, when the majority of the population used a telephone box to make calls (because the cost of owning a phone was too great), so local people and travellers will use the 'hotel-of-the-future' for telemeetings, because of the high cost of video-conferencing facilities. These will, in effect, be the phone-boxes of the future.

7.3. Virtual Reality
The use of an extended version of immersive VR, with the mixing of real and computer generated images, may appear to offer the ultimate form of videoconferencing. However, the requirement to use headsets inhibits eye contact, thus creating an unnaturalness in human interactions which may offset the advantages gained from the use of VR. More thought needs to be given to such issues, and to how VR technology is likely to evolve in the future, before the role of VR in videoconferencing can be fully assessed. However, suitably lightweight and miniature elements such as active spectacles and contact lenses are already at the prototype stage.

7.4. Three Dimensional Presentation
As we move into the 21st Century we can expect 3D services to permeate into the CAD/CAM arena. Architects, car constructors and aeronautical engineers have all indicated a need to 'walk through' new designs of buildings, cars and aeroplanes to experience the novelty and to examine the design merits. 3D imaging systems offer an attractive solution. A number of technologies are available. Spectacles free (auto-stereoscopic) systems (eg. using lenticular screens) are better suited to video-telephone and video-conferencing applications, while the ultimate 3-D image might be a moving holographic display.

8. CONCLUSION
The world is going through a deep-seated transition which is impacting on all aspects of society. The major characteristic of the transition is a compression of time and distance scales coupled with the removal of delays through communications and computing technology. Whilst the scale of the impact is principally evident on the open market process and on an individual basis, it is evident that all systems in society are having to adapt at great speed. However the changes taking place can allow a new post-industrial society to emerge, but only if the opportunities offered by the widest spectrum of available computing and communication technologies are allowed to flourish and are exploited effectively.

9. BIBLIOGRAPHY

• C Handy (1991) The Age of Unreason. Business Books Ltd.
• P F Drucker (1992)The New Society of Organizations. Harvard Business Review. Sept/Oct., pp. 95-104
• G Gilder (1991) Into the Telecosm. Harvard Business Review. Mar./April, pp. 150-161 Word Count = 2927