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"From Hero to Zero in a millisecond"
Telecoms guru Peter Cochrane on meeting the challenge of change
Elspeth Hyams, Director, Institute of Information Scientists

"Large corporations appreciate their agents of change until they succeed," according to Peter Cochrane, speaking as the guest of LASER (the networking development agency) at an end-of-the-century review of the state of the communications revolution in London in December.

"You can go from hero to zero in a millisecond and it takes about three years to get back to where you were"

This was a fairly broad, free-ranging overview of what the information society would mean for human economic and social activity. It touched on subjects from the implications for governments of international 'virtual' companies, that do not 'sell' anything and do barter - to the implications in human terms of so many current companies' rapid rise and demise. Peter Cochrane is renowned in Britain for his expertise in effecting radical organizational change, but he hinted that the stresses of being that agent of change are great. His own organization, British Telecom, had downsized from 242,000 to 110,000 in only seven years, and aimed for drastic further reductions in order to survive. It was easy, in circumstances like that, to fall out of favour ("You can go from hero to zero in a millisecond and it takes about three years to get back to where you were") but this was, he said, a time of breathtaking opportunity and dizzying possibilities for those who embrace technology and are prepared to be flexible in how they work.

As well as his work running BT's research laboratories, and managing change, Peter Cochrane is the current Chair of CoPUS (the Public Committee for the Promotion of the Understanding of Science) as a physicist, a technologist and an entrepreneur in his own right. In a talk peppered with memorable aphorisms he gave a highly personal view of the significant features of the change currently riding roughshod over existing business assumptions, economic models and patterns of social organization.

The problem today was one, he said, of changing paradigms that have become so established that to change them is to destroy them. However, in technology and innovation terms, it was getting more difficult to make erroneous predictions because the time between concept and delivery of final product was getting shorter, down from ten years to about two.

Primitive understanding of machines
In the past, BT had been highly pessimistic about technology and highly optimistic about the 'sociological' factors. History had proved the opposite way. But the world was now getting to grips with a completely new kind of technology. Much of business traffic was already handled by machines. By 2010, he forecast 95 per cent of all the traffic on the earth would be between machines and not involve people at all. This was a radically different world:-

  • In 30 years, computers would be a billion times more powerful than now and their cost would be far cheaper.
  • Computers could perform tasks that it was impossible for humans to achieve.
  • Humans were learning from machines.
  • Modern logistics now used 'engineering' software solutions - a combination of 'evolved' software and algorithms, so-called artificial agents - to deal efficiently with problems such as allocating repair work to a large force of maintenance engineers in a chaotic, random and constantly changing situation.
  • The mathematics to represent this situation was convoluted and still incomplete, but the software 'worked'. Thanks to it, companies like BT were now able to allocate tasks by the second, and use their workforce in the most time- and geographically efficient way.
  • BT had reduced the size of its workforce and saved £1/4 billion in costs.
  • Machine-based solutions such as these were ones which humans would never individually be capable of. But humans should aim to harness the power of the technology, to make it work for them, even if their understanding of how it worked or what it was ultimately capable of was still at an elemental stage.

Our current level of sophistication in understanding the capabilities of machines is primitive, he said: "the equivalent of being able to recognise an animal on the horizon and club it to death." The days of the lone inventor, moreover, were gone - it was more or less impossible to make significant breakthroughs without working in multi-disciplinary teams, to cater for human diversity and get close to the 'complete' human being'.

In an online world, different mathematical laws came into play. In the past, the telephone network had worked because people made few calls, and made them in a random way. The aggregation of all these random actions allowed the sharing of resources. But in the internet world, there is no aggregation in the random sense. Everything was causal and correlated, which created huge engineering challenges.

Company lifetimes
In addition, in the business world, the life time of companies was getting shorter and shorter. The lifetime of a successful company had been until recently about fifty years. Often now, it was about ten. Of the world's three leading companies, only the second, General Electric was 'old'. Microsoft had existed for twenty years, and the third, Cisco Systems, a household 'unknown,' had been in existence for only fifteen. Many household names would need to make radical changes or fail and he predicted that soon companies would arrive, trade successfully, and then disappear again, maybe all within a year. People would need more education and training, they would need it on demand, and they would, increasingly, work serially and in parallel. Educationalists needed to respond to this change in demand quickly. UK institutions had failed to respond quickly enough to a demand for tailored courses for BT and BT had created its own training courses, using amongst other resources, world famous lecturers, online from MIT.

"It is weird to write a book as if we did not have multimedia"
In a challenge to information specialists, Mr Cochrane described giving away books from BT's technical library. Books, he said were the wrong medium. Information had a half life - about six months. By the time a book was published it was too late - the picture had moved on. Words, moreover, were inadequate for "what we are about and what we have to do". "It is weird to write a book as if we did not have multimedia." Everything was information intensive and fundamentally chaotic - and all of us "lie under a torrent of data, trying to find information." Nonetheless, BT had the second largest digital library in the world - second only to the US atomic research establishment at Oak Ridge. But, in a virtual world, the library became a cache, and many of the documents might be multimedia documents. Many of BT's former 'librarians' were now busy creating useful digital resources.

A short article cannot do justice to the range of this talk, which also covered the impact on logistics of creating a .com world, the dangers of making economic decisions without having any viable economic or social models on which to base the decisions, social exclusion through information deprivation, the challenges of adapting economic activity at a time of break-neck economic change, life choices in the learning environment, the dangers to public health from failing to bring information together, work patterns in the global economic community and many more.

In response to a question from the floor, Mr Cochrane admitted there was a possibility that data mining could wipe out libraries. But information professionals would emerge in new roles. In keeping with his own eclectic, open-minded approach, Peter Cochrane called for more holistic thinkers, but expressed his fundamental optimism. "When there is a collective threat, you find humanity comes together to solve problems," he said.

The message was clear: get out there and start team working, networking and sharing!