Scan Monthly No. 007September 2003 |
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Signals of Change
Beauty Medicine and the Worried Well
SoC025
Beauty medicine provides consumers with benefits that lie somewhere in the overlap between therapeutics and cosmetics. The worried well are those of us who are relatively healthy, anxious to stay that way, and willing to pay to make sure we do. The British Medical Journal talks of "lifestyle afflictions." Both beauty medicine and the worried well represent markets that will grow dramatically as Boomers age. In affluent marketplaces, treating some lifestyle afflictions will prove more profitable than treating many medical conditions.
Offshoring into a Skills Shortage
SoC026
The short-term benefits of shipping high-tech jobs off to cheaper labor markets in the developing world—"offshoring"—are unlikely to outweigh longer-term problems that companies may incur because of indiscriminate offshoring initiatives. The United States is due for a skills shortage as Boomers retire, the U.S. workforce shrinks, and the percentage of the U.S. population completing a college education stops growing. Some companies are shoring up rather than shipping out their workforces in anticipation of increasing competition for a limited pool of skilled workers. Offshoring is certainly a valid strategy, but companies that exercise that option in a plan that takes into account certain demographic certainties will come out on top of the coming competition for skilled labor throughout the world.
Patient, Heal the System!
SoC027
The solution most readily at hand for the failing health-care systems in many industrialized countries is to ask the patients to pick up the tab. As a protracted debate about universal health-care coverage begins in the United States, health plans and employers are busily transferring costs and responsibility to patients, in the hopes of controlling costs. Business models for various parts of the health-care industry are morphing to adapt to the shift.
Cognitive Agent That Learns and Organizes
SoC028
SRI Internationals Open Agent Architecture will finally have the chance to prove its value, as major research institutions use the protocol to create an infrastructure to integrate and coordinate the efforts of computer agents that can learn, reason, plan, perceive, and communicate. By integrating those capabilities into a single computer system that the researchers call CALO (for Cognitive Agent That Learns and Organizes), they will be blazing the trail of machine cognition.
Insights
| Consumer-Driven Health Care | View summary |
| D03-2442 | Download this Insight |
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Rising health-care costs and the inability of current health-insurance models to continue to bear the brunt of these increases are giving rise to many proposals for reform. The looming prospect of aging Boomers' increased health needs and the growing prevalence of chronic diseases in all age groups are adding to the clamor for change. Among the proposals attracting reformers' attention are consumer-driven models of health care that give consumers more choice in return for assigning them more responsibility for cost containment through their purchasing decisions. These models vary widely, from plans that give employees a fixed or capped employer contribution to pay for health-insurance premiums to plans that combine a personal spending account with a high-deductible health plan. Currently, economic and public-policy developments favor continued market adoption of consumer-driven health plans. Proponents of the plans believe that they will produce better-informed consumers, who will in turn drive changes in providers' offerings and present a business opportunity in the marketplace. Though consumer-driven health plans will never completely replace current insurance models or be ideal for everyone, they are likely to usher in a new era of health-care consumerism. Author: Andrew Broderick. 8 pages. Index Keywords: Consumer Expenditure; Health Care; Insurance Industry; Labor Force. |
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| Business Implications of New Directions in Speech Technology | View summary |
| D03-2443 | Download this Insight |
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After years of falling short of expectations, speech technology has come of age and is now a viable user interface for a wide variety of products and services. The technology is currently most entrenched in call centers and within cell phones, but many more applications are emerging, cutting a swath across industries. Many of the new products and services are at an experimental stage, probing the market's response, but together they mark a significant industry shift that will usher in a second wave of market penetration for speech technology. A look at emerging consumer, government, enterprise, third-party, and marketing applications reveals five new directions in speech technology: The technology is moving from interactive to proactive applications, from enterprise to small-office/home-office applications, from "hard" speech recognition to "soft" speech recognition, and from well-defined markets to widespread penetration. These new directions have important business implications and will give rise to new application areas and new business models. In turn, users will benefit from more efficient transactions and improved customer service. Author: Martin Schwirn. 14 pages. Index Keywords: Computer Software; Information Technology; Marketing; Mobile Communications; Technology Trends. |
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| New Tools and Challenges in the War against Spam | View summary |
| D03-2444 | Download this Insight |
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E-mail plays a key role in facilitating e-commerce and business communications, so the current epidemic of spam in people's e-mail in-boxes is a growing concern for consumers and retailers alike. A single spammer can send tens of thousands of e-mail messages per hour at very little cost. For this reason, spam fighters have focused heavily on technological solutions for finding and eliminating junk e-mail, the most common being filters that scan for signs of unsolicited bulk e-mail and delete or reroute messages that fit their spam profile. A number of social solutions are in the works as well: White lists of reputable e-mail marketers, blacklists of spammers, and challenge-response schemes that require e-mail senders to verify their identities help prevent junk e-mail from reaching networks in the first place. More problematic are legal solutions, which are difficult to enforce given the boundaryless nature of spam. Pay-per-message proposals have some promising elements but must overcome many practical hurdles before they can work. Most likely, a combination of solutions will emerge as people look for the right balance between control and flexibility. Author: Thomas M. McKenna. 7 pages. Index Keywords: Advertising; Business Ethics; Computer Security; Computer Software; Electronic Commerce; Information Technology; Internet Technologies; Marketing; Technology Trends. |
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| Open Source eLearning: Opportunities and Threats | View summary |
| D03-2445 | Download this Insight |
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Open Source eLearning (OSeL) leverages many of the techniques and practices of the Open Source software development community in both the writing of software and the development of content for eLearning applications. Community authorship, open and aggressive peer review, and innovative licensing and copyright arrangements for software code and content are all concepts that hold the potential to benefit various educational communities, from kindergarten to corporate executive seminars, greatly. This study examines efforts to date to leverage Open Source techniques in the eLearning area and speculates about how important OSeL will be for eLearning software and service users and providers in both private and public sectors. The study also looks at which regions of the world will likely be hot spots for the rapid development of OSeL-based solutions. Author: Eilif Trondsen. 23 pages. Index Keywords: Education; Human Resources; Information Technology; Knowledge Management; Training. |
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Calendar
Scan™ Briefings
The 2003 biannual Scan™ Briefings in which Scan staff present Scan analysis and findings in Menlo Park, California, will take place on:
- 23 October 2003 at 9:00 am
- 20 May 2004 at 9:00 am
Scan™ Abstract Meetings
Scan abstract meetings (in which SRIC-BI [now SBI] staff participate in a free-form discussion of current Scan abstracts) are open for client observation/participation on:
- 22 October 2003 at 1:30 pm
- 21 January 2004 at 9:00 am
- 17 March 2004 at 9:00 am
- 19 May 2004 at 1:30 pm
- 21 July 2004 at 9:00 am
Watch List
The Scan program's scanning and research processes identify areas on the periphery of your organizations's focus that constitute potential opportunities or threats. The areas that we decide bear watching go on Scan's watch list of defining forces that are transforming the business environment. Current watch-list topics include:
