Communications and Disintermediation

The Transformational Power of New Communications

[Getting the middle people out!]

In the beginning, in a few monasteries, there were many monks creating manuscripts. Then, in 1456 or so, a wine press was repurposed as a printing press. The monks were disintermediated, knowledge was diffused further and deeper, and nothing was ever the same again.

At the recent Nieman gathering of the Fellows [May, 1995], there was a substantial degree of confusion! And let me say that if you are not confused, you should be. If you read yesterday's excellent WSJ Technology report or today's item in USA Today, you may find some help. I did.

Disintermediation - Threat or Opportunity ?

• Top-down to Bottom Up
• Black Box to Open System
• Mass Production to Customer Driven Mass Customization
• High Entry Barriers to Low Barriers
• One-to-Many to Many-to-Many
• Manufacturer-centric to Customer-centric
• Passive Victims to Active Participants

We will build it to the customer's specs, not our convenience. That is to say, computer-based communications will disintermediate industrial health care and politics, just as it is doing to industrial commerce.

New Communications always changes our World

• (Telegraph, Telephone, Movie, Radio, TV, ...)
• Horse & Buggy medicine to Remote control surgery

For examples of award winning New Media internet sites, please visit the National Information Infrastructure Awards site: Click Here

Current Issues -- Opportunities

Privacy - who owns the bits [Email? Medical Records?, Insurance data?] Security - safety? Encryption - Free or Government controlled?
• Universal Access to Service - Cost issues (What can we learn from 1935? 1949?) [Distributed electric motor & ubiquitous electricity]
• Text Book of Future - laptop communications device & WWW
• Will Access Inequality drive Income Inequality
• Politics: TV in 1960? Internet in 1996?
• New Economy Independents or SOHO as a world view?

It's really NOT about:

• Technology
• Information
• Time
• Place

It's about relationships & community.

We will learn that it is the quality of the relationships we build over time with our customer-partners, formerly called 'patients', that determines the value difference we create. This collaboratively created value is the only sustainable advantage when everything else is an interchangeable commodity. [With thanks to Esther Dyson.]

This process also builds community - the essential precursor for the creation of knowledge. Knowledge is, after all, the product of dialog within community. Thus community becomes a critical element of the emerging knowledge economy, where the basic question transforms from the rate of capital formation to the rate of knowledge formation.

Now we have come full circle: In the beginning, in a few hospitals, there were many Doctors seeing patients. Then, in 1994 or so, computers were repurposed as multi-media communications devices and nothing was ever the same again. In particular, all of the priesthoods were forever changed as once tightly controlled information became widely dispersed and out of control.

                            Prepared for:
         New Media & The Health Care Industry: RX for Success
                     New York City,  June 20, 1995
                  [Copyright / June 1995/ Jock Gill]