Novel technologies will become everyday tools

Looking into my crystal ball of technology, I see the blur of Web sites, bandwidth, e-commerce, databases, GIS, e-mail, Internet, intranet, privacy, security and dot-coms. Let's see if we can bring it into focus.

It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that up until now many business people knew they needed to be on the Internet. Many didn't know how or why, but they went out and got an Internet Service Provider.

Along with the ISP came e-mail and we all reserved our dot-coms. We created Web sites for our companies and a few even integrated the Web site into the work we were already doing before the Web came along.

Wait! Back up a second. Did I say, "integrated the Web site into the work we were already doing?"

There is the first image that is coming clear. In the coming year we will begin to get over the newness of some of this technology and start to use it as just another tool to achieve our goals.

People will begin the localization of technology to see how it can be used to make a difference locally. This will be done at the personal, business and community level.

Influence over what we are doing with our dot-coms will go from the computer department to the marketing, operations and administration departments.

Remember the phrase, form follows function. No longer will we be given a cool gadget from the computer people and then try to figure out where we will use it.

Rather, we will let the computer people know what we need to accomplish and together we will come up with a cool tool to get the job done. You know, some people are already doing this, and it is working very well.

Electronic commerce, buying and selling things via the Internet, is a good fit right?

Sure it is, but what if you are selling things that aren't really things. What if you are selling services or expertise, community betterment or something else you can't hold in your hand?

Yes, e-commerce is still good, but we may have to redefine it to better suit our needs. What if we could use it to provide better customer service?

We're going to do that in 2000. We will integrate our existing customer service function with our Internet functions.

And we will have a better-prepared staff because our intranet will efficiently place information at each employee's fingertips.

I know, you already have an intranet that provides your staff with access to the customer database, and the inventory database, and the parts database, and the service database and the database database.

How about all those passwords? Have you gotten to the point where you have to know the password to get into the file where you keep all of your passwords? Well, this year, we are going to start changing the way we deal with all that information.

The buzz phrase here is knowledge management. This year we will weave together all of our information and present it in a common format. Imagine logging in to one place and searching all of your databases simultaneously. It's happening already.

There are some other really cool things to watch. One of my favorite is Geographic Information Systems or GIS.

GIS takes your data and geographically shows you information you may not have even known you have.

To keep this simple, it takes information and makes a visual representation, a map or picture if you prefer.

This has been one of our areas of focus at ORION, and you can see projects ranging from the Greene County Assessor's parcel information to the Greene County Internet Holiday Light Display at

http://www.orion.org/gis.

This year, Springfield and southwest Missouri will begin to understand and use the power of GIS in business functions.

This crystal ball only shows the obvious, but the picture is coming clearer. In 2000 we will begin to localize technology by integrating it so it becomes a normal part of how we live our lives.

(Kevin W. Tharp is coordinator for ORION and president of the Missouri Association of Community Information Networks.)