Jonathan Mitchener is a Futurologist at BT, and spends his days at BT keeping a close eye on the industry and meeting companties as he researches the direction technology is going in. He'll be writing an occasional series of posts for us on how future trends affect small business.
As BT Futurologist, and gadget guy (well I lead BT Device Evolution research!) I look forward to making some regular contributions to this blog. And look forward to seeing any comments too.
A futurologist looks decades as well as years into the future, so beyond single recessions and point technologies, and tries to identify ways to help organisations and companies better navigate their way through the waves of change, particularly tech-driven that hits us all nowadays.
The topic I thought I would begin with this time is all about the social networking phenomenon ... Young people already embrace it and indeed see it as a primary way to communicate. So companies that have younger customers are also having to explore these methods as new channels to reach this sector. Facebook, MySpace and others have built into large communities of people, and hence future customers if not already. Then there are the more professional connecting sites such as LinkedIn.
These can be very useful to keep in touch and recommend people when so many are moving between companies for employment yet building skill sets. And then there are the communities aimed at specific types and sizes of organisation which have a certain amount in common to share , such as BT Tradespace. The information people exchange on these sorts of social networking online systems are the sorts of things that we used to just write down on scraps of paper or in notebooks, 'because it was useful!'.
Today there is so much information available, time pressures mean that we all have to be choosy about where we go and how often we visit different systems and websites. But there are some gems out there depending on your interests. And there are some new technologies coming along to help us filter and select the information most useful to us. I may cover this in a later blog contribution.