The Silicon Handshake: doing business in the electronic future A Public Lecture by John A. Armstrong IBM Vice President, Science and Technology and 1992 Regents' Lecturer, University of California, Santa Barbara February 18, 1992 (Revised April 5, 1992) Introductory remarks The implicit promise of the title of my talk today is that I will tell you something about the future -- not necessarily something that's going to let you to make a killing on the stock market, but something that will be interesting and perhaps thought-provoking. In one sense, since managing research at a high tech company is my bailiwick, I'm a visitor from the future, I don't have to peer into a crystal ball to see the future. I just have to observe and report. And traditionally for talks such as this one that has meant reporting on the gadgets we have in the lab, the "feeds and the speeds" of prototypes and all the "gee whiz" I can muster. I touch on these today, but my real interest in this talk is in how technology changes our lives, how it changes the relationships we have with each other. I propose to look at how technology, put in service of the organizations, is changing the distribution of power, the way things get done, the quality of goods and services, and employee morale. Moreover, the title of this lecture ... "The Silicon Handshake" ... refers to two trends: First, the evolution of computing and telecommunications is certainly changing the world of work and study. And second, not the least of these changes is in the relations between people in the organizations in which they work. Indeed, the word "handshake" is meant to convey my belief that there will be many positive aspects to these changed relations. Of course, the theme is too vast, and in many parts too technical, to be dealt with in one hour. So I will narrow the scope of my remarks to the simpler topic: In what ways will the evolution of technology alter the relationships between people in fairly large businesses of the year 2000? Although for concreteness I have relationships between people in companies in mind, much of what I think may happen will probably happen in universities ... or at least, I believe it could and should happen in universities. As you listen this afternoon, I urge you to ponder the ways in which what I describe about industry might be translated to the world of the university. Computers and the applications that run on them in different departments, subsidiaries and suppliers of corporations are being tied together in integrated networks ... and are thus changing the organizational fabric and the operational strategies of companies. But of course the quality, quantity and scope of the relationships between members of an organization also have a major impact on the success of that organization ... every bit as much as the network of technologies being used. New forms of communications allow new forms of relationships and allow relationships with more people. This has already happened on several occasions in history with the progression from face-to-face transactions, to mail and newspaper, to telegraph and telephone; all these technical innovations enlarged the spheres of influence of both managers and employees. These expanded relationships have changed the nature of organizations by allowing them to become much more complex and far-flung. A familiar example; e-mail To begin with, let me offer a relatively well-known and early example of what I'm talking about, electronic mail, which is really a new mode of communication. That is, I want to look beyond the obvious use of e-mail to send messages. Consider a typical young worker, in a big organization, low in hierarchy but with something on his or her mind. She might think long and hard before picking up the telephone and calling the company president directly. That would seem too brash, too intrusive. On the other hand, sitting down and writing a letter might seem too cumbersome, too deliberate and too risky. It would be done as a last resort, possibly not at all. Along comes electronic mail ... a message from your computer to the boss's computer. As many have observed, this is not just a new technology, it is a new form of social exchange. Although the explicit message may be the same, the implicit message of electronic mail is different from that of a phone call or a letter. Sending electronic mail to the President of IBM or to our Director of Research is less intimidating to the sender, and less intrusive to the receiver. It is also an interesting fact, observed by many, that electronic mail is more informal than normal business correspondence and therefore more appropriate to the small scale private honesty which is a crucial part of successful communications anywhere... and which is essential to the long term health of any institution. What may we expect of the hardware? But electronic mail is already here, at least for some workers in some institutions. So are answering machines, FAX, cable and satellite communications. Even so, my view of the future is: "you ain't seen nothing yet." I can say this with great confidence because I see vast potential left in the process of miniaturization, the technological engine which has driven our revolutions in computing and communications. The various hardware technologies which support telecommunications and computing are semiconductors, switching subsystems, microprocessors, electronic interconnections, magnetic and optical storage, lasers, opto-electronics, optical fibers, etc. Each of these technologies has been improving in performance, cost, and reliability at its own exponential rate for the past twenty or more years; and the only reasonable, informed extrapolation is that each of them will continue exponential improvement for another ten to twenty years. That implies anywhere from an 8 to 30-fold improvement per decade. Over a twenty-year period, there will be from 60 to 1000-fold improvement in microprocessor performance, magnetic recording density, etc., etc. Yet this remarkable evolution in computer hardware, which promises to bring so many changes to the business world, will pale beside the revolution in digital optical communications. There will be from a few 100 to a few 1000-fold improvement in readily accessible bandwidth and in cost performance in just ten years. That will have profound implications. * * * * * * But now I want to return to the theme that there are new relationships in business made possible by technology. I will build my remarks around two examples from our experience in IBM. I'll talk about IBM not because it is the only, or necessarily the best source of examples, but because it is the example that I know first-hand. Moreover, since some 90% of IBM employees have access to e-mail and other forms of computer-mediated communication, we have accumulated a fair amount of experience. The first example is a new wrinkle on electronic mail that I'll call Electronic Briefings. Though these can take various forms, a good example is when a senior executive sends an online electronic mail message to hundreds or thousands of employees and includes a special, temporary online computer address for responses. The executive then personally replies to all the responses. That's the deal. Some interesting things happen as a result. First, the overall reaction is usually very positive. Both the executives and the employees like this new but nonetheless seemingly "direct" contact. Employee responses, even those that include complaints, express appreciation for this opportunity to talk to the boss. And, beyond the "feel good" aspects, most responses have been content rich. The success of Electronic Briefings is not, however, guaranteed. It is, in fact, a very demanding medium, and making it work is contingent upon a number of factors. First, the executive must be committed to writing the messages to employees and replying to their responses personally. Otherwise, it becomes just another staff communication added to a stack of letters, articles and reports that vie for an employee's attention. Second, both the messages and the replies must have substance. They cannot be vague or full of bureaucratic fluff. This is such a personal medium that you must put something individually appropriate into each reader's hand to make it work. Finally, the turnaround time on responses must be short, preferably less than forty- eight hours. This takes advantage of the immediacy of the medium. Participants -- on both sides -- need to see that when they talk, someone is listening. There are rules on the employees' side that need to be kept in mind as well. Executives are not giving these electronic briefings because they are lonely: they are not requests for "electronic pen pals;" nor are these special reply addresses an invitation to circumvent existing complaint mechanisms. But having said that, our experience has been that care and respect put into the online briefings will be reflected in intelligent and thoughtful employee responses. I can't help wondering how this might be useful in the university to enhance the relationships between students and professors ... a kind of "electronic office hours" to supplement regular ones. Indeed, there are many ways in which electronic access, if it were available to all students and faculty, would be an enormously powerful and transforming force on campus. These Electronic Briefings are new at IBM. But another new medium, Electronic Conferencing, has been evolving in IBM for over ten years. Recently it was given a thorough analysis by one of our Research Division staff, Davis Foulger. In his PhD thesis, Foulger has traced the evolution of conferencing, compared electronic conferencing in detail to other media, provided case studies and discussed the socio-emotional content of conferences. I can only give you a taste of his analysis here today, and I recommend that you explore it. It's a fascinating and important document. It is available from University Microfilms, Inc. and is called "Medium as Process." Here's a formal definition of conferencing. "When computer software mediates human interactions by collecting messages from individuals and distributing them to communities of individuals, the medium of human communication is computer conferencing." Some of you will be familiar with the related forms of conferencing on CompuServe or Prodigy, or the BITNET and USENET systems of the the Internet. A participant in an electronic conference posts an electronic message on a well-defined topic, and that message can be viewed and commented on by a self-selected community of other participants. Participants respond to the message either publicly, by posting another message in the topic area, or privately, through electronic mail. Or they can do both. What's pertinent to today's discussion about IBM's conferencing is, first, that it is business- oriented, and therefore has something to say about future business relationships as conferencing and other technologies become ubiquitous. Secondly, although there are tens of thousands of employees involved, they all have in common a set of goals and values that derive from being IBMers. That set of shared values and expectations lets conferencing inside a single organization go well beyond what has evolved in public conferencing systems. Third, Electronic Conferencing in IBM has a long, well-documented history that can be drawn on for insight about the future. And further, we are lucky enough to have technical means at our disposal for conferencing which will not be generally available (because of infrastructure costs) for several years. One view is that conferencing is not a natural phenomenon. It's an invention, and the forms that govern, control and stimulate it are made, not discovered. But we observe that this created thing has been molded by the needs, philosophy and attitudes of the participants. Indeed, it may well be that, in some larger sense, it is a natural thing. The computer conferencing system at IBM has grown exponentially in the ten or eleven years since the introduction of the IBM PC. This system has a number of advantages over other conferences now, but these advantages are typical of what will be available to all organizations of substantial size in the near future. People can access it at their desks, and pay nothing, as individuals. The user interface is simple but powerful, so it's easy to use. There is lots of bandwidth available, so materials can be seen and scanned rapidly. The bandwidth is important because the first thing new users discover is that even in the liveliest and most informative forums, there is a lot of redundancy, fragmentary conversation, and other "ephemera." There is much useful material, but the density is low, so support for rapid skimming is important. And since, as we have said, they share values, goals and allegiance, their contributions, called "appends," tend to be constructive and friendly. You don't often see cursing or name calling even though it's possible to post such appends, at least temporarily. The result is that our conferencing is very lively, and the concentration of useful information and intelligent discussion is high compared to what you tend to see in other conferencing milieus. For example, on the BITNET and USENET conference systems on the Internet, or on CompuServe or Prodigy. New topics, or "forums" as they are called, complete with owners and stated purposes, have been created spontaneously by the thousands. Today, we have about 2000 active forums. On average, some 2000 appends are added each workday. They come from all major IBM sites, all over the world. Our biggest problem isn't getting a discussion started, it's getting it stopped. In fact, there is a constant tension between the discussion advocates and the information advocates. While some celebrate the "intercontinental coffee break," others ask repeatedly, and spontaneously, "Is it business related?" Conferencing society is very much in flux today, and the rules are still vague enough that neither group has the upper hand. The network is not yet entirely "civilized." Effectively, the conferencing network is a frontier that's as close as your fingertips, the Near Frontier, if you will. And as is true of any frontier, there's a relative scarcity of rules that makes some people nervous. We have a powerful new means of discussion that is not entirely understood or under control. To some, it is not "true blue." To my mind, however, the actual evolution of IBM PC is testimony to the power of IBM's traditional values ... respect for the individual, service to the customer, and striving for excellence ... it is "true blue" in that important sense. In any case, I believe that frontier status gives conferencing a certain cachet that invites inventiveness and brings out the best in our people. In fact, we stand at a point where conferencing is not fully sanctioned and receives only a tiny amount of funding despite the fact that it has attracted on the order of 100,000 IBMers, 28,000 of whom are active, appending participants. But that's not all bad. As long as conferencing is "on the outside" its participants will have an easy time defining it to fit emerging needs. It is a perfect tool for re-inventing the corporation ... or at least some of its processes. Let me now describe these thousands of electronic forums under a number of large categories that Foulger calls "genres." The most important that have been created, and/or observed, are: Tools, CMQ's, Answers, Lightning rods, and Metaforums. Tools: Interactive Software Development Conferencing began in IBM as a means of internal distribution of software and information about software. That was the first genre, and such software specific uses are still at the heart of the justification for this system. OS/2 Development One example of conferencing working for the benefit of the corporation in a clear, bottom-line oriented way is work on the development of our newest version of the OS/2 operating system. Naturally, the groups directly involved in this product kept in close contact via both electronic mail and conferencing. The interesting thing was the level of involvement of IBMers who were not in any way directly involved with OS/2 development. Thousands of IBMers downloaded test versions of the new software and used it under real world conditions, without any special knowledge. Let me tell you, these people constituted an interested and demanding user set. They not only found bugs that had gone undetected previously, but they insisted upon changes that made OS/2 run more smoothly with popular applications. They made suggestions for new features that have significantly enhanced the product. They even offered criticisms of the marketing and the advertising of OS/2. In just one of the dozen forums used to discuss the OS/2, developers received over 240,000 lines of feedback. That's equivalent to 8,000 double-spaced pages of text. Many IBMers were energized by their involvement in OS/2 forums. They have become so committed to the product that they have formed TEAM OS/2, an ad hoc group dedicated to evangelizing vendors and users. These IBMers, always on their own time and often at their own expense, are making it their business to provide demonstrations at users group meetings, respond to questions, criticisms and rumors on public bulletin boards, and talk to vendors about their plans for OS/2. Beyond putting a face to the product and providing facts, these TEAM members are communicating their passion for the product. The IBM executives responsible for the launch of OS/2 2.0 have recognized the power of this grass-roots electronic conferencing effort, and are giving it support and encouragement, in effect making it part of the overall IBM launch plan. And finally, when the final version of OS/2 became available at the end of March, thousands of IBM people received copies literally overnight via the same electronic delivery mechanism that runs the forums. Clearly, this represents a level of teamwork, cooperation and involvement that makes IBM a more competitive company. And it wouldn't be possible without computer conferencing. CMQ's Computer Mediated Queries (or CMQs) are another of the oldest and simplest genres. If you have a question in a well-defined area, you post it and answers appear. These are tight, information-oriented forums, and the participants are often fanatical about discouraging discussion. In fact, current usage writers to put a thank you in the same append as the question. That way, the clutter of thank you notes can be avoided. Interestingly enough, the advance "thank you's" seem to encourage more responses to queries, as if people are more generous once they have their payment in hand. These forums are among the easiest to make a business case for. People get real answers to their own and their customers' questions. The answers arrive quickly and, according to forum users, the answers are better overall than those available from other sources, such as manuals. One query might lead to several expert answers, and the inquirer can choose the one that fits best. Answers The desire for distilled information without chitchat is so strong that another genre was created, Answer Forums. These include discussion-free rendering of information out of other regular forums. In the rules headings of these forums there are stern warnings against appends containing discussion, and these Answer Forums are vigilantly protected by their owners who become specialists in what is whimsically referred to as append-ectomies. It seems obvious to me that "Answer Forums" would be of enormous utility in a university setting, where there is a constant influx of new students, faculty, and other visitors. Moreover, in my experience with other universities, there is a constant struggle to provide really first-rate Freshman Advising, and other forms of Counselling: electronic conferences, distilling good, accurate advice, and weeding out or warning against bad advice, would seem to me to be very useful. Of course, this presupposes a level of networked, universal access which is not yet common in universities ... but which, I believe, will become standard. But back to Electronic Conferencing in business: "Business related" is for many the prime directive. But, to quote science fiction writer William Gibson, "The street has its own uses." And early on it became clear that many people were more interested in discussion than questions and answers. So this urge gave rise to another genre of conferencing forums called the Lightning Rod. Lightning Rods are forums that are designed to draw to them discussion that would otherwise clutter up and/or be a distraction in other forums. Thus, these forums may serve a business- related purpose even though the substance might skirt the rules. Metaforums While Lightning Rods are forums which draw off chatter that worsens the signal to noise ratio of topical forums, Metaforums are aimed at solving a problem that can kill forums, namely extensive discussion of the validity of the forum itself and its administration. Discussions of censorship, the business-relatedness of particular appends, and phrasing that was considered insulting or otherwise out of bounds overwhelmed many early forums. Often degenerating into variants of the schoolyard argument "did not/did so," other participants would abandon forums rather than put up with the contentiousness. And without a pool of active participants, the forums would die. This became known as murder by metadiscussion. The initial response to this problem was to ban metadiscussion. That, of course, lead to discussion of the appropriateness of the ban and to battles over the ban's application. In short, the ban didn't work. Metaforums are an alternative solution to metadiscussion that seems to be working. For instance, the metaforum called "SENSITIV" is a forum that allows discussion of word usage that may be insulting to some in the community. As an example, one appender recently had his consciousness raised regarding the expression "Chinese fire drill." The phrase "politically correct" is currently under discussion. With a worldwide community, more than 25% of whom speak English as a second language, the potential for hurt feelings is high. These problems can now be dealt with in SENSITIV, and directed away from the other forum genres. Still another genre has been invented to serve as a temporary "catch all." "TEMPMISC" is a place not only for discussion that doesn't have a home, but for discussion for which it is not clear that a business case can be made. Here the controlling factor is time. Anything that is sufficiently uninteresting or out of bounds NOT to find its way to another forum or a new forum is gone in a week. The "WHYCONF" forum is a metadiscussion forum that's used to talk about the benefits and philosophy of conferencing. By doing so, it helps accelerate the reinvention of conferencing by its participants. There are a variety of other genres as well, including electronic seminars, voluntary newsletters, online user groups, and focus groups, and the number continues to grow. By now I hope you'll recognize that our use of conferencing goes well beyond project-oriented work. And so I would now like to comment on some interesting sociological aspects of conferencing in a large, relatively homogeneous organization... examining themes that will become increasingly common in the near future, I believe ... and which eventually will have their analogues in universities. The topics I have in mind are the effects of conferencing on the immediacy of personal interactions and relationships, the tendency to evolve a spontaneous meritocracy, and interesting effects on organizational hierarchies. First, the immediacy of conferencing is one obvious way in which conferencing allows new possibilities compared with many other forms of communication within large , geographically dispersed organizations: the dramatic speed with which communities of interest can exchange information, come to conclusions and take action has little precedent. Second, let me deal with the notion of meritocracy in an electronic conference. When my daughters were young adolescents, they'd go on Sierra Club hiking trips with us for weeks at a time. Since these weren't necessarily family trips, they often were the only kids along. But they were treated as equals by the adults, because they were up to the physical demands of hiking. They associated as peers with adults who were not their parents and not their teachers. That was an unusual experience, and they loved it. Similarly in conferencing, if you contribute effectively, you are treated as a peer. It doesn't matter if you lack formal or organization credentials. Another interesting aspect of conferencing is that many conferencing relationships are enhanced by lack of direct acquaintance and by the lack of any visual image of participants, and by a lack of detailed knowledge of "who is who" in the company. Recall that tens of thousands of IBM staff in forty countries participate. The lack of the special personal knowledge that comes from face-to-face contact is not a hindrance, and sometimes is an AID, to focusing on the topic at hand. This effect of partial anonymity leads me to another effect. Among a group of people who have been self-selected by their common interest in the forum topic, there is no natural hierarchy except the one which evolves from participation and expertise in the topic itself. Over time, forum experts emerge and are deferred to (electronically, of course). It becomes clear based on their answers that there are people who are particularly helpful. It is both a natural, working meritocracy and a natural hierarchy. But paradoxically, when a prominent hierarchy exists, as it does at IBM, electronic conferencing and electronic mail tend to flatten it. Perhaps this discussion of meritocracy, hierarchy, and immediacy raise in your mind, as they do in mine, questions of "Governance." Who is in charge? Who makes decisions? How is freedom balanced with responsibility to use the classic dilemma of political order? There are three sources of authority for a conference: Company management, the technical colleague who is the "forum owner," and the participants. Management has formal rules which boil down to keep it legal, don't be offensive, and keep the discussion work related. The forum owner is the agent of enforcement and will delete additions that are out of line. The owner also has the option of locking the forum, temporarily stopping the addition of appends until some of the tougher problems, which range from legal to interpersonal, are worked out. When a forum teeters on the edge of disaster, it may be put on "preview" so that all appends are viewed and approved before they are posted. By the way, rarely, individuals who continually violated rules have also been put on preview for a term of a few weeks to a few months. Occasionally, when a forum was in regular violation of the rules, management has stepped in and suspended it or closed it down. No one likes to do this. Out of the thousands of forums that have been created, less than a dozen have been closed by management. The forum owner has a larger role than rule enforcement. He guides the discussion when necessary, usually via the technique of the bully pulpit. Participants are directed to other forums, encouraged to create new forums and bluntly told when a discussion has gotten circular or played itself out. On occasion, forum owners have resigned when participants have gotten too unruly. Control of the forum also is in the hands of the participants. They may hound their fellows who are rude, insulting or cynical out of the forum. They may fill up the electronic mailbox of someone who can't take a hint. One technique is the quotation rebuttal, which reframes the words of an opponent, something that is easy to do in electronic media. It can be a powerful means of exposing wrongdoing and sloppy thinking. It can also be harsh and insulting. Perhaps because keyboards, terminals and optical fiber are distancing, the emotional content of conferencing tends to be high. The potential for misunderstanding is also high, so people use typographical cues like smiles, frowns and winks to let people know their attitudes. Borrowing from printer formatting commands, many participants mark off sections of their appends that feature editorials, off-topic remarks or paranoid rantings with on/off lines such as: (script style):editorial on. These people do not understand their business. (script style):editorial off. It is very rude in the conferencing world to send a note in all caps. Transgressors are told almost instantly to stop shouting. Polite participants warn their readers when a long append will follow. Despite my earlier suggestions that there would be great benefits to the widespread availability of electronic conferencing on campus, I predict that these issues of governance will be troubling in the university setting, and that there will be great ferment before the appropriate balance is found. Perhaps the most dramatic example of how emotional conferencing can be was the SHUTTLE FORUM, which was created within thirty or forty minutes of the Challenger disaster. It is impossible to read through the transcript of this conference and not be moved. Included are eyewitness accounts, expressions of shock, then hope, and finally acceptance and grieving. IBMers from all over the world contributed over 100 messages. Was this a work-related use of conferencing? The question was asked almost immediately, and the rationale given was that the conference allowed people to keep up-to-date without leaving their desks. Davis Foulger provides two other rationales. First, it helped employees understand IBM's relationship to the shuttle program. Second, and most importantly, it helped morale. He says that "participants discovered, through the event, a previously unstated common aspiration that, in many cases, was key to their mutual career decisions ... (they) discovered themselves ... as a community with a variety of common interests, not all of which hinged on the use of personal computers. (They) rediscovered IBM as a company built of many people who care deeply about their work and their world." So the Electronic Conference has a heart. And in a world where businesses succeed or fail on the strength of their teamwork, this is not a trivial discovery. Changing the Organization A potentially important effect of conferencing on the organization is its effect on how people work and what they do. Newcomers are often told that people who get top appraisals are those who stay informed about IBM, and one way they can stay informed is via conferencing. Forums can even have significant impact on careers. In one documented case, a customer rep who was an influential voice on one of the forums was recommended by an IBM Vice President monitoring the forum to a Director for a new job. The job in the Director's organization was created primarily to increase the amount and quality of dialogue between executives and forum participants. The rep works in Maryland and the group that tapped him works out of New York. The forum made it possible for the rep's talent to be recognized and put to work. And the job itself is aimed at flattening the organization and breaking down barriers. What will happen as the technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous enough to permit Video as a routine part of Conferencing? After participating for a long time in one conference, IBMPC, I've subconsciously formed thoughts about how these active forum people look. Wouldn't it be great, I think, to get all these people together? The reality of it is that bringing my IBMPC colleagues together would be like putting radio actors on TV. All of a sudden the relationships, which had been established because of the self-selected focus, would be complicated and, in many cases, diminished or deflected. If we were to meet face to face, we wouldn't just talk about the software topic. We'd talk about other things, and I might find out I don't like their politics. Or people one likes electronically are really boors in person. This bears some thought because the bandwidth is expanding. I foresee that in the soon-to- come world of multimedia, you will have the option of sending your message as a video clip. You will be able to have N-way teleconferencing, and so there will be new electronic relationships and a new sociology that will evolve with pictures, images, video clips. If you don't see that as opening up whole new worlds to adjust to I invite you to take out your driver's license and look at your picture. That's a public image you had little control over. An online phone directory with pictures at IBM Research has gotten a number of complaints because some people don't like the pictures of them that were used. There are several reasons for this, of course. Some are related to the phenomena of anonymity and hierarchy we discussed earlier. Secondly, I suspect that the advent of video will mean that new formal and informal practices will emerge soon after video becomes commonplace. At a minimum, people will take pains to control their online images. At a further level, we may have people who will try to concoct their online images out of whole cloth. Imagine what it would do for your career if your live, full motion image looked like Paul Newman or Tom Cruise or Cybil Shepard. Summary Let me return to my original question. In what ways will the evolution in technology alter the relationships between people in businesses of the year 2000? If we take conferencing as the model, I see five areas of likely change: 1. The trend will be toward a continuously more aware and knowledgeable workforce. Employees who "conference" will be more aware of what's happening elsewhere in the organization. Technical people will be more sensitive to the needs of marketing people. Sales people will know who the experts are on software bugs. Managers will have a powerful additional means to find out what issues are bothering staff. Everyone will have the opportunity to be a tutor in their area of expertise via electronic seminars. We will all be better aware of the quality of our colleagues and have an opportunity for coherence and teamwork that otherwise would not be possible. 2. Business processes will be more direct and more ad hoc. Workers will have more options, more diverse ways to get things done. The way many people get their jobs done in IBM has changed thanks to computer conferencing. Many of our customer representatives have become dependent on forums to get answers to the customer's question. And they've come to expect good answers in a timely manner. Software is tested and critiqued by thousands of IBMers before it is put on the market. Self-selected teams form on the network to get jobs done. And people expect to participate in continually reinventing conferencing to make it better suit their needs. 3. Both the expectations and the morale of employees will be higher. There is a sense among many conference participants that anything is possible. They expect conferencing to solve their problems and answer their concerns ... and they expect it to happen right now. They don't tolerate old bureaucratic style, and they are particularly impatient with management that does not respond, participate and share information. You might think that this would lead to disappointment and lower morale, but the opposite is true. When the expectations are met, they are celebrated. Every time IBM executives join discussions, participants, even those who are the most critical, give them warm welcomes. Conferences give people a sense that they have some control over getting things done the right way, and that there are people out there, people with shared values, who will cheer them on when they succeed. 4. Power will shift and become less related to hierarchy; the rules of the game will change dramatically. We have seen with conferencing as it exists today the emergence of a meritocracy. People turn to those and refer others to those who have expertise, who can get the job done. There also are indications that those who participate in conferencing move into management and get high performance appraisals, increasing their influence within the organization. Knowledge, as it is gleaned from conferencing, is real power in the organization. Those who are already high in the management chain are using conferencing to inform themselves and to lead. At the same time, they are taking some risk by making themselves vulnerable, providing virtually unfiltered and highly visible access to all participants. Executives have been dared, criticized and lectured to. But they also have been praised, defended, and informed. Conferences have democratic tendencies that will only become more important with time. People want the power to re-create the organization in which they work, and they are getting it. 5. All of these changes will lead to higher quality in products and services. That's the natural result of better communications, of breaking down bureaucratic barriers, and of more aware and happier employees. We're already seeing that people don't just get faster answers, they get better answers. Online focus groups and surveys are recursive and content rich. People are using forums to test products better and to anticipate problems and needs. And every day brings success stories from peers that inspire confidence and the willingness to try to achieve at the highest levels even when the odds are tough. Excitement The elements for success in business today are vision, courage, communications, information, dedication, concern and commitment to excellence. These elements will still lead to success in the future. And of course, these are the same elements required for success in academic institutions, and there will be the same possibilities for constructive use of technology ... as exemplified by Computer Conferencing. That's why the excitement in my vision of the futures doesn't just come from new gadgets with flashing diodes and massive memories. It comes from the way technology can be used to enhance human relationships. By understanding how organizational factors can be changed, we can anticipate, optimize and make the best use of technology to find success in the future.