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IT: ubiquitous force.

Article Excerpt
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Information technology and its results touch every aspect of our lives. Statistics reveal that If will be all ever more vital and multidimensional part of our daily lives. While the opportunities ale obvious, the challenges are often hidden.

12 TRENDS changing the world

A five-year research project reveals that the future of commerce worldwide will be greatly influenced by a dozen "global tectonics" that will affect business leaders across all industries:

1. Biotechnology

2. Nanotechnology

3. Information technology

4. Population

6. Urbanization

7. Resource management

8. Environmental degradation

9. knowledge dissemination

10. Economic integration

11. Conflict

12. Governance

In 1957, the United States, gripped by tear of nuclear attack and deeply involved ill the cold war, watched as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I into space. That moment marked a new age in space exploration, innovation, and competition as the United States and the Soviet Union began the Space Race.

In response to what appeared to be Soviet technological advancement over the United States, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Project Agency. (ARPA would later add Defense to its name and be commonly known as DARPA.) It was ARPA, and the academics who led it, that fostered the start of innovation unlike any the world had ever seen. Hailed as the most influential agency in the history of computer development in the United States, ARPA was charged with developing technology to assure that the United States maintained a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from adversaries.

With this charge, J.C.R. Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first head of the computer research program at DARPA in 1962; it was Licklider (or "Lick" as he was known) who envisioned the Internet. He wrote a series of memos before his appointment at DARPA about an "intergalactic network" of computers that could communicate freely with each other. At that time, there were some 10,000 computers in existence, none of them personal computers and all of them slow by today's standards. Lick recognized the need for computers to be more accessible to humans, easier to work with, and connected to each other. He sold his DARPA co-workers on his revolutionary idea. Today, there are more than 800 million computers around the world, with 230 million in the United States alone.

In 1969, several efforts from around the globe came to a head with the development of the first host computer network connecting the University of California, Los Angeles to Stanford University. By the end of that year, four host computers were linked together and the host-to-host protocol was completed. The Internet was born.

Today, the Internet continues to spread to all parts of the world. The share of U.S. households with Internet access increased from 26.2 percent in December 1998 to 41.5 percent in August 2000 and to more than 60 percent by 2004. By 2003, the market was estimated at $6.9 billion in the United States alone. During the same period, the share of Americans using the Internet rose from 32.7 percent to 44.4 percent.

According to Neilson ratings, more than 200 million Americans--75 percent of the population--have access to the inferrer in their own homes. More than 60 million homes in Western Europe are now online. Despite the use of English as the base language of the internet, expansion of the World Wide Web outside the West has been substantial. An estimated 60 percent of the world's online population resides outside the...

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