Page 54 - Using MIS

22 Chapter 1 The Importance of MIS

Q7 2025?

In Q1, we said that future businesspeople need to be able to assess, evaluate, and apply
emerging technology. What technology might that be? And how might it pertain to future
business?
Let’s take a guess at technology in the year 2025. Of course, we won’t have perfect in-
sight and, in fact, these guesses will probably seem ludicrous to the person who finds this
book for sale for a dollar at a Goodwill store in 2025. But let’s exercise our minds in that
direction.
One near certainty is that most computers won’t look like computers. Apple’s iPad,
for example, does not look like a traditional desktop or laptop, but you can use it to watch
videos, listen to music, read books, store photos, surf the Internet, and network online.
You can also buy apps for the iPad that are educational, such as ones designed to aid tod-
dlers in learning their ABCs and others focused on helping high school students learn the
periodic table.
Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire, which is advertised as a media device, is a computer. It just
doesn’t look like one. What happens when you turn on that Kindle? You are connected, magi-
cally as it were, to the Amazon.com store. You can buy books, magazine subscriptions, and so
on, with a single click.
Furthermore, everyday items now have computers in them. Tanita offers a scale that sends
an electrical pulse through your body and then provides not only your weight but also your
body fat, bone mass, metabolism, and level of hydration. You can wear a watch that counts the
calories you have burned and the number of miles you have walked or run and reports them
back to a Web site. You could link this data with your doctor’s office so that your physician could
actually prescribe exercise, just like drugs. In fact, you’ll see an example of this very application
in Chapters 7–12.
We can expect that televisions and autos and parking meters will all be computers, or at
least have a computer inside. We can further imagine some middle-aged, overweight man sit-
ting at a Pizza Hut when the 911 staff arrives to carry him away.
“Why are you here?” he’ll say. “I’m fine.”
“Oh, no you’re not. Your pacemaker called us because you’re having a heart attack.”
By 2025, it’s likely that desktop and portable computers as we know them today will have
disappeared. They’ll be replaced by mobile devices of many different types. Your employer
might not even provide you a computer; you may be expected to bring your own computing
device to work, or maybe all workplaces will have computing devices that you make personal by
signing in. We explore these possibilities further in Chapter 4.
But let’s apply systems thinking to the social implications of these changes. If everyone in
the world is wearing Google Glasses or something similar by 2025, would shoplifters or bank
robbers or mass murdering-bombers be caught in minutes? Doing so would require not just
the image data but also huge networks of computers to process the image data in real time.
And, if so, what does that mean for privacy? And where are the business opportunities in all
of that? 10
Will people still go to work? Why? Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer required her employees to
come to work and earned the disdain of many. Is she on the wrong side of that trend? She says

10 Anton Wahlman, “Could Google Glass Catch the Boston Bomber?” TheStreet, last updated April 18, 2013,
http://money.msn.com/technology-investment/post.aspx?post=f0d8f47e-1d83-4c0b-a9f1-c6bbf250fc3c.