Vision

The speed of the developments in information technology and the great variety of applications and areas of application never ceases to fascinate me. The profession of automation is getting a more and more business-like angle, in which the creative finding of possible applications is becoming more important than technological ingenuity. Looking back from the next century, one will find that around 1995, due to the enormous processing capacity of chips and the immense growth of the capacity of the various storage media for digital data, we crossed a threshold. The complete infiltration of information technology in products, services, production processes and management structures has begun. Digital highways, for example, are being constructed at such a high pace, that my (future) grandchildren will frown at me when I tell them one day that the delivery process by mailman went rather smoothly.

The infiltration of IT will have great consequences for business, government and society. In the transition from the industrial age to the information age, established patterns of working and relaxation, both with respect to time and to location, will become the subject of discussion. The way in which and the instruments with which automation experts contribute to this will also change dramatically. This will have far-reaching consequences for the skills required from the EDP expert of the future. For this reason, Cap Volmac had a vision written down, describing a wide range of new technologies, their possible applications and the resulting social consequences. Such a vision cannot be anything but a careful attempt at extrapolating certain trends. According to the author and several seasoned technology watchers of Cap Volmac, the picture that is presented is a realistic one.

‘How valid is this vision?’, you will wonder. After all, neither Cap Volmac nor any other company or expert is capable of giving a scientifically founded view of a completely ‘informatised’ society. The only thing one can do is ‘predict’ with a certain reliability the performance characteristics of chips and communication lines in the near future. Human creativity, however, can never be predicted (and fortunately so). After all, who has been capable of predicting the advent of the spreadsheet through interpolation? Who saw paradigm revolutions like object-orientation and client/server coming? The exiting thing about the future is the fact that it is more than just a mechanic extrapolation of the past.

What does Cap Volmac want with a book such as this? To wake people up from the daily routine thinking! Some statements in this book are deliberately bold in order to trigger the discovery and exploration of new possibilities, to broaden the ‘mind setting’. Our American colleagues have a name for this: ‘reframing’. And it is fun to reframe in groups. There is far more satisfaction in discovering new possibilities together in ‘natural work teams’ than in attending a navel-gazing solo of some master mind. The many valuable sections in this book therefore must not be adopted uncritically. Anyway, in this age of ‘surfing’ and ‘hyperlinks’ nobody has the discipline anymore to study a book cover to cover. The subjects discussed only come into their own if they are used as tools in mind-broadening discussions. Discussions in which Cap Volmac will gladly play the role of facilitator.

Cap Volmac therefore had this overview written for your pleasure and to challenge you to conceive of possible scenarios for the future.

Let us bring this book to life together.

Utrecht, August 1995

Prof. dr. D.B.B. Rijsenbrij

 

Acknowledgements by the author
I thank all those who contributed to the creation of this book, such as my colleagues within Cap Volmac who provided me with useful material and who have commented the draft version. For their special contributions I would like to thank: Herman Gels, for his assistance in the finalisation of the book; Paul Ostendorf for his many ideas; Marita van Hasselt for her editing, critical remarks and the English translation.

Utrecht, August 1995

Hans Goedvolk