Dr. James Canton is president of the Institute for Global Futures, a San Francisco-based international think tank and strategic planning group. His website is www.technofutures.com. He is editor-in-chief of 21st Century Online, an award-winning digital magazine on the Internet, and his new book is called Future Smart: Business Intelligence for the 21st Century. This article is taken from Dr. Canton's keynote address to the APPA membership at the 1998 Educational Conference in San Jose, California. APPA is pleased to acknowledge the CMD Group for its generous sponsorship of Dr. Canton's speech.

The world is changing in very fast and dramatic ways. Do you remember when your job revolved around keeping the lights on and making sure the buildings are warm during the winter? You never saw or heard from the dean too much, you did your job, and you kept out of the spotlight as much as possible. Remember that job description? Well, that's history!

Why? Because we're faced with a variety of new complex technologies, market drivers, and economic shifts in the world that are reshaping every single organization, every single industry, and I'm here to give you a strategic heads up of exactly what those changes are, what those technologies are, and how they may affect you in the future. My definition of the future may be one minute from today, not necessarily five years from today, though I will give you some forecasts.

Are you ready for a world where supply doesn't equal demand? Are you ready for a world where companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build products to then give them away? Are you ready for a world where less than 50 percent of all the products that will have superior market share in the 21st century haven't even been invented yet? We're living in a time of accelerated change. But what does that mean and how might it affect your world?

I'm going to talk on two different levels today. I'm going to talk on a level of how our larger society and economy is going to be reshaped by technology and what those key technology trends are. I'm also going to drill down on how it may affect you.

Imagine that the year is 1900, and I come to you with an idea about a new device that's going to sit in everybody's home, and it's going to tell stories and have pictures and music, and it's going to fundamentally change commerce as we know it. It's going to fundamentally change even education as we know it. It's called the television. If I came to you in 1900 with an invention that sounded completely outrageous, revolutionary, impossible, a miracle, how many people would have believed me? Very, very few. Let's go back even further. The year is 1400, I've got this terrific friend who's developed this thing called the printing press. Up to then, publishing was a nice little niche business for monks who were forced into making liqueurs after that.

So would you believe me if I tell you today that we're on the edge of a global digital culture, one that includes smart robotic systems, low orbiting satellites scouring the planet, the Internet, and virtual education—that we are at the edge of a convergence of a variety of new technologies that are going to fundamentally change culture, society, and certainly education as we know it? What was blasphemy yesterday is reality today. Digital culture is a force that is changing all generations.

Want to hear about your customer? The students as well as the faculty and other staff members who walk through your halls? There have been more breakthroughs, more innovations in terms of technology, more inventions in the past hundred years than the previous 2,000 years. What's happening? We're developing a variety of new super tools that are changing our culture. My 75-year-old mother has e-mail. This is a cultural force.

New Business Model

There is a new business model that is going to affect you. How many of you in facilities management have been or are involved in your institution's strategic planning for not just the facilities and the infrastructure, but for the other stuff, the virtual education, teleconferencing, and scanning that goes on there? How many of you are in those conversations of strategic planning? Now, how many of you are reactive to other parts of the college or school system making those decisions and then planning upon you?

You need to be in the conversation about strategic planning, and it's a lot bigger than the facilities. Why? Because the student of the future is going to be looking at how wired and how ready your facility is for the 21st century. So what does that mean? It means that all of a sudden you have been relegated as part of the strategic thinking team at the university to help plan a 21st century-ready facility. If you don't, it's going to have a big impact on the quality and the number of students and faculty who choose to come to your institution.

All of a sudden you're involved in a competitive road race for the 21st century. And you've still got to keep the lights on and the buildings cleaned and maintained. But it's a more competitive environment where students can go to 5,000 different universities—and more than 150 of them are virtual, and possibly doubling in number in the next few years. Prospective students are going to start looking at how smart those rooms are, how smart is the facility, how available is it, how Internet-deployable is it.

The new business model in every industry, not just yours, is the network economy. Enterprise-wide, global connectivity drives opportunity, and it will drive yours in educational facilities. I was in Idaho recently giving a presentation to the Idaho Business and Trade Industry Association. The fellow who spoke before me was a dean at the University of Idaho. He showed all kinds of new technologies and made a great facilities presentation. But really, what was his message? I asked him, "How are you going to grow your university? You don't have that many bodies in Idaho." Of course, I knew the answer, but I wanted to see if he knew the answer. He was way ahead of me. "Virtual," he said. "Our market is for students is China." China? He was telling this to a crowd of Idaho senators and business leaders, and they were scratching their heads. How come China? "Well," he said, "we may not have a lot of people in Idaho, but there are a couple billion people over the next five to seven years in China who'll be ready for school, and who's going to take care of them? We've got tremendous technical and engineering capability, tremendous science capability, so we're building a virtual infrastructure." Who's his partner in crime at the university? The facilities people.

The new value chain is virtual integration. In every single industry, we are finding that the folks are connecting the people that make stuff with the people that buy stuff. The more that can be done through the Internet, the more people are squeezing better efficiency and more profitability out of their operation. Now virtual integration is, in one way, causing what we like to say as future's disintermediation. What does that mean? It means that a whole lot of industries and businesses are going to be reshaped, and a lot of bodies are going to be disappearing from the traditional workforce. There's a reason that AT&T and IBM and others have offered early retirement. They had ten times the people interested in early retirement. Why? Because people are looking for greater opportunity in the market place and are leveraging off of these new technologies.

Real-time agility is the new approach for doing business and for running organizations, nonprofit or profit. How fast can you get me that information and make a decision? How fast can we transform our infrastructure to be able to provide the services so that our customers—students and faculty—can make faster and better decisions?

We do major studies for corporations worldwide. What do we find? Tremendous failure about how to roll out new technologies. Tremendous technologies that, at the same time, work with big companies, and small ones. What stopped people from adopting new technology? Fear of change!

I'm going to give you a model you can use to dissect your organization, the people you work with, and your future. We did a study for Fujitsu on why people weren't adopting new computer products. There are four styles about how people manage technology adoption and how they manage change when it comes to embracing new technologies that are intended to enhance peoples' lives and productivity. By the way, none of us like change, so this isn't good or bad, this is just the way it is. There are, in virtually every group of people, representations of all four styles.

The first style is the traditionalist. The traditionalist is an overt resistor of change. This is the individual you go into a meeting with and he or she says, "You know, this is a really bad idea giving all the students free Internet access! That is crazy!" A traditionalist's motto is "if in ain't broke, don't fix it." They might say, "Hey, we've been running the facility for so long like this that I just don't see any reason to change this." Traditionalists tend to be the boss or key decision maker; they've been around a long time.

A maintainer is a covert resistor of change. The maintainer says yes but means no. You always know you've got a maintainer because they say, "That sounds like a great idea, Bob, I'll send you some e-mail on that." You find out later they never had e-mail. What's wrong with this picture? Maintainers don't like to make waves. "Oh, you've got an idea about how you want to form an alliance with the local ISP and offer Internet service and get the telco to subsidize it and produce a consortium so we can offset these costs and provide it to the students? Great! Give me a report on it." Why? So he can forget about it. That's a maintainer.

Adapters, the third style, tend to be willing to learn. Are they afraid of change like all the rest of us? Yes. But they're willing to learn and to try new things. Adapters are willing to do what? Adapt. They're willing to change. They recognize that "I need to fight these battles by being smarter, more creative, and coming to conferences to network with my peers."

The fourth style is the innovator. You can always tell an innovator in a meeting. He or she is the champion of change. The innovator is the early adopter of the change. Innovators tend to innovate. Why? Because they recognize you're in an increasingly competitive environment. You do have customers, there is competition. What you do does make a difference. It is important. And your role needs to get bigger! You need to advocate for a more strategic relationship within the organization. It's not just about being reactive to building out the infrastructure, it's about being involved in decision making for what that's going to look like and all the different aspects of it.

So what does that mean? You've got to get smarter about the future. You've got to learn a bunch of new things yourself. You've got to leverage off of other people who are smarter around you. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Despite all of this technology stuff, you don't need to know it all yourself—you need to surround yourself with people who get it.

I want to tell you about another aspect of real-time agility. There's two models on the Internet that represent very interesting new business models that I think are going to have an impact on your particular market. Think about an environment online where you can bid on any product and service that you want. How about an education? I'm willing to pay "X" number of dollars as a student for a four-year education or an MBA. Who wants to compete for that business? Think about that as a business model.

What about infrastructure? I'm willing as a facilities manager to pay a company to build out my infrastructure, to lay out fiber, make it videoconferencing capable, and put fiber nodes all over and ATM switches, and all kinds of cool stuff. "X" number of dollars for this facility. Who wants to bid on that? By the way, all this bidding will be done in real-time. How ready for real-time agility are you or your organization? Or are you just keeping the lights on? Are you just keeping the buildings warm?

Digital Convergence

Have you noticed all of a sudden that computers, telephones, and TVs are starting to do some of the same kind of things? There are approximately more than 8 million personal digital assistants available today. People are walking around with these little PDAs, pilot organizers, and other useful devices. Soon you'll find more and more of them will be wireless. They'll be connected to telecom systems.

It's a tremendous opportunity for you to play a role in creating alliances. You can leverage off of the needs of students and faculty on one side of the equation with you as the facilitator of a gateway in the university system, the gatekeeper of that infrastructure.

On the other side of the equation, all the corporations are at a level of crisis and are looking for high-tech, career-oriented graduates. And we've got a crisis in the United States about this. Why? When you've got corporate America banging on the doors of Congress to let more immigrants into the United States because they do not have the confidence in the educational system to produce high-tech executives fast enough for them, you've got a problem.

Now you may say, what does that have to do with me? Hey, I'm managing the facility. That's the people who are managing the education's problem. Is it? Is it really? Maybe not. Mass customization is the next key trend. More and more, whether it's an educational program, a telecom service, or a smart-card deployable product, the ability to be able to mass customize information on demand is going to be a critical way that people are going to be competing more and more. So mass customization is a key trend for the future.

We as a culture are embracing new technology faster than ever before. Let's talk about your customer of the future. Twenty-first century customers, and I mean both the faculty, the administration, your external customers, and students with higher stress, and a high expectation for quality service. More and more, as new technologies come out and they change the economy, whole industries and markets are going to be reshaped. It's already going on. It's happening just faster because within a generation you can see it now. Forty-plus percent of Americans will be telecommuting—they won't be at the office, they'll be in the market place.

I would predict that the next evolution in higher education is going to be people that never stepped inside the university, totally matriculated outside of it, and are living thousands of miles away in China, South America, and other places. Your customer base is going to expand; it's going to be transglobal. More and more customers are going to be looking for infrastructure that can link them to a wired universe. Are you ready for those challenges? Are you in that conversation? Are you part of that strategic planning? Or are you in a reactive mode?

Customer relationship management is critical to all of this. Another key uptrend in business and in organizations is how you're managing those relationships, what kind of technology are you using to do that? What's your customer relationship strategy? Or are you just keeping the lights on? Knowledge value management is a major key uptrend which I'll finish with before we move into technologies. I would say this is, and again, this is a heads-up for you because it may not be touching you as much as it will—every organization is facing a challenge between being able to extract knowledge out of all the data they collect on customers, all the data they collect in the market place, and all the data that they buy.

Knowledge is smart, just data is dumb. How much of what you have in your organization, your database if you will, is smart? But the idea of extracting knowledge that empowers people to be successful, empowers students, faculty, and administrators to be successful. This may be the real business you're in. Maybe you're not in the facilities planning and managing business anymore. Maybe that business, maybe that value proposition has completely changed. Maybe you're a knowledge value engineer. Because really what you're doing is managing the knowledge in this space and making it available through the pipes, the systems, the wires. Maybe you're facing fundamental changes, and we'll take a look at what some of those technologies are.

Okay, those are the key uptrends. Now I'm going to drill down on the specific technologies to give you a sense of what and how this is going to change you. The four major forces of technology that are reshaping our planet include quantum physics, which gave us the principles and paradigms to be able to build computer chips. If we didn't have the principles of quantum physics, we wouldn't be able to build chips in computers, it's that simple. Quantum mechanics gave us the variety of new principles and paradigms to be able to build chips. Okay, first force, quantum mechanics. Second major force, computers. All of a sudden we now have the principles, we built a variety of computer chips. Real fast chips. These chips are the foundation and computers are the foundation of super tools to build what? What's the third major force? Biotechnology. Real simple. Again, here's another major take-away. Take away these three forces, you got it. Biotechnology could not have happened, would not have happened without the second force: computers. Quantum mechanics gave us the principles to build computers; computers gave us the tools to be able to create biotechnology. So what the computer's worth in the 20th century, biotechnology will be to the 21st. I'll show you what it means.

And the fourth force, which will show up more and more over the next five to eight years, is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology, quite simply, before we get to some examples of it, is a combination of computers and biotechnology. Now you may say what do these four forces—quantum mechanics, computers, biotechnology, and nanotechnology— have to do with me?

These are the four forces that are going to completely reshape our planets very quickly. Not in four generations, not in two generations, in one generation. Why? Because you're all going to be living longer. So let's go back now that you've got it. You have a change model, you can take the dissector organization, and you've got the four forces. Now I'm going to give you the specifics around that.

By 2008, probably beforehand, we'll have a one billion transistor 10 gigahertz chip. Now what does that really mean? You've got about 200 megahertz on your desk today. But Gordon Moore, who gave me this number, what it means is you're going to have very smart, new chip technology. His example, the first silicon DNA chip, very fast, smart, intuitive technology.

I know you're all Y2K compatible, right? We've got about 200 million PCs on the planet, but we've got 7 billion other non-PC chips. In your space, all those embedded chips in the walls that is the biggest problem when it comes to Y2K. Don't focus just on the computer systems. Don't focus just on remediating the data stuff. And I know in terms of the hierarchy, the dean will want X, Y, and Z. Make sure all of the alumni are remediated. Take care of that database. And admissions and billing systems and all that because that's where the bread and butter comes. But if you don't handle this chip problem and go back to the vendors, and you don't handle the networking problem surrounding that, you won't have an organization functioning when the clock strikes 12:00:01. Sensors are everyplace.

And imagine what's going to happen here when we've got these even half a billion five gigahertz chips. You're talking about very intuitive systems, wearable computers with voice activation, forget about the keyboard, distributed smart systems and visible computers that disappear into the architecture. But to get a sense of just how far out this may go, here is your phone call. Here's what it's going to look like. You're concerned about the Y2K problem, you go ahead and you call the dean and this is what happens. Visualize this. You're on the other end of the phone. "But Dean Whitley, I have a letter from my vendor..." Will that dean be impressed or placated?

Amazing things are being done with virtual reality for meetings, for health care, and for training. But I would say that everything from embedded knowledge, this is a student at MIT who's walking around with an embedded computer. All of a sudden, with 40-plus percent of Americans commuting over the next five years, the smart-card ready car, and the car as an information and communication delivery system will be part of your menu. Then imagine advanced wireless tele-health systems—every clinic, hospital, and emergency room tied to the same Internet system and the same video-teleconferencing system. And of course, as we know, we're all going to have health pins, personal information numbers, as soon as Congress gets to passing that.

Is that going to create a major privacy issue in America? The aggregation of all this? On one side of the equation, we're networking, connecting everything, right? On the other side, we have not spent as much time considering the social impact of all this. You think you should be involved in those conversations? Are any of you part of the privacy committee at your institution?

When it comes to curriculum development, we're seeing more uses of artificial intelligence and super-smart computers. There is on-demand publishing.

A lot of people like to say that the Internet is the future, period. I think it's just part of it, a big part of it. We're looking at approximately moving toward 200 million people on the Internet. We'll have half of billion on the Internet by the year 2000.

Now, you may ask, where is all this going? It's the enabling of digital communities that will drive the Internet to be in your dorm room, your home, or at office and allowing you to communicate with people with your interests. What people are using the Internet for today, particularly the private intranets, more and more it's not just database access, managing products and services, but particularly it's customer service of some kind. Being able to provide information on demand and more and more of that will be education on demand.

We're living in a time of accelerated complex change. It will affect you and everything you do. Secure electronic commerce is on its way. Different kinds of information services: tele-health security, home banking, and education, of course. Much of how we get information will change. When I'm talking about the Internet here, I'm talking about the Internet as a back-end distribution for information and education, that will be accessible through personal digital assistants, telephones, televisions, wearable clothing, embedded microprocessors in landscapes, bus stops, etc.

Virtual education will be a $100 billion market place. These are pretty big numbers. If you're not in the conversations of how we can address the virtual student and what the virtual curriculum would look like, you should consider getting into those conversations because this will be a major upswing. I would predict probably in less than five to eight years a key revenue driver for most successful universities will be their virtual student. But imagine, I'm up in the mountains, in Timbuktu, and I want to tune into my physics course with my professor and I also want to have interaction, I'll be able to do it at 30 frames per second. With Digital TV, you'll have 70 percent of consumers teleshopping. Over a third of those will be aging baby boomers that want to go back to school, but don't want to necessarily move from their home in Palm Beach or Palm Springs or Palm whatever. So they'll be going to school through their digital TV. Over the next 36 months you'll see this rolled out.

Digital cash, the death of money, the new smart-cards—are you ready? With stored values of ten bucks, hundred bucks, thousand bucks, microprocessor-based smart-cards will have all kinds of memory. But then smart-cards will emerge where you'll combine smart-cards with a digital wallet and have videoconferencing.

When you've got robotics, talk about cleaning up the facilities. Aren't you tired of cleaning up all those facilities? Wouldn't you like to have a smart robotic system? Telerobotics for surgery systems like this are already being deployed right now. Will we have robocops that go into areas we won't want to send real human beings? Robot doctors to operate on us? Will we finally have robot teachers? Definitely. Why? Because we can. Smaller, faster, cheaper technology. Computer power doubles every 18 months, and decreases in price by 50 percent. That's why every computer that gets made on Wednesday, by the time it gets shipped, it's already decreased in price by 3 percent. Every day it sits on the inventory, it decreases by 4 percent. We're living in a time of accelerated change.

Biotechnology, virtual drugs, and human enhancement will be the largest industry in the 21st century. Now who doesn't want to live an extra 50 years with the vitality of a 25-year old? The human genome will be mapped over the next five years. We will know your unique footprints. Nanotechnology, being able to enhance your health, your well being and your longevity, is where we're all going. Longer life spans, and believe me, the pharmaceutical companies know it.

So what's my summary? You really have a 21st century digital organization in the making now. The question is, are you going to take up the challenge and build it? Redefine your role in the future. Are you really just in facilities? Or are you in a larger conversation? And that larger conversation, I think, is knowledge value management. Managing knowledge is the new competitive edge. Providing knowledge value solutions and alliances to empower your customers. But to manage your virtual customer relationships, you've got to have a strategy.

Let me leave you with this thought. The universe is changing very quickly around you. But if you approach this as an innovator, as an adapter, and you start to look outside of the paradigm of your particular space to see what's going on in the outside and getting a sense of how you can play a greater role in your organization for ushering in the 21st century, I feel that you will be ready to meet this challenge. I look forward to seeing you again in the future.