To start off our letters to the editor, we asked some of our old friends to talk about how technology was changing their industries. Here's what three of them said:

Do you ever ask yourself whether today's whiz-bang technology is anything more than the latest fad? Do you quietly wonder if these high-tech marvels deserve a place in your less-than-high-tech-company?

For all who can relate to such questions, I'm happy to share my story.

I manage a mid-sized industrial goods manufacturing business. Dependable. Solid. Stable. Good people who work hard—with no burning need to be out on the bleeding edge of new technology. The sort of outfit that's proud to call the Midwest home. Yet my company is now 18 months into a program that has thrown us directly into the path of an onrushing monster called digital technology.

Tuthill Corp. is deeply involved in a change effort that features powerful information technology as a central element—a so-called Enterprise Resource Planning system. Why are we investing so heavily in such a tool? Because I see no alternative.

Does this mean I am leading my organization away from its time-honored stability and toward instability? Yes.

Simply put, we've decided technology is a powerful lever to maximize our flexibility and exploit our capabilities. We've decided that technology can give us the ability to prosper in a changing, less-than-stable world.

We're in the thick of it all right now. Our 2,200 employees are coping with the demand to learn new skills. And the further we race into this brave new world, the less we talk abouth the "end of the project" and the more we focus on the great things we can do once we get past these "first phases."

Tomorrow's customer is a difficult customer. At Tuthill, we're tooling up with information technology to help us understand what's required—and to respond in a superior fashion.

So, off into the unstable future we go.

—Jay Tuthill
CEO
Tuthill Corp.

As the world moves from atoms to bits, it's hard to find an industry more based on atoms than the forest products business. It takes an investment of $750 million to build a modern papermill, which stretches for a length of more than two football fields and produces a reel of paper bigger than a tanker truck. Production is measured in tons of paper, bags, boxes and chemicals. Every atom of the tree is used in the product or the manufacturing process.

A couple of years ago our business managers began a concerted effort to develop innovative ways to add value to our commodity products to meet the needs of an increasingly discriminating and demanding marketplace. And guess what? We discovered the world of bits!

In 1995, Union Camp launched an aggressive $100 million program to rebuild our infrastructure, revamp our shared services, and replace order fulfillment, marketing, and sales support systems with innovative new systems. By 2000, meeting our customers' needs for individualized service will be just as much a matter of bits as atoms.

We see the disruptions information technology has begun to make in other industries, and we wonder: Will technology transform our business in the future? Can we brand our products? Will the electronic marketspace change the need for packaging? Will electronic communication erode the use of paper? When?

Even though we will not have completed our systems development effort for another year or so, we believe we must be preparing to leverage the I/T investments and exploring digital business strategies now. There are so many unknowns and so many possibilities that we believe now is the time to start experimenting and learning. Then when we see a business opportunity, we will have built experience, done the analysis and be ready to move.

This is all new and a little daring for a company that not many years ago viewed I/T only as a cost to be minimized. But we also think that information technology will transform our industry's operations, and we want to be in there making it happen, not struggling to catch up.

—Susan M. Arseven
Vice President and CIO
Union Camp

One would have to be a card-carrying Luddite to doubt that discussions about "being digital" have become the newest national pastime. Within the television broadcast industry—where hype is an art form—it is difficult to overstate the challenge and potential disruption presented by digital technology.

By granting television broadcasters a chunk of transmission spectrum and mandating that they transmit material based on some yet to be defined admixture of technologies, the FCC has presented broadcasters with the most monumental opportunity ever encountered by the television industry—a chance to reinvent its relationship with viewers. It's the mother of all inflection points!

Or is it? A handful of years from now, will digital spectrum simply represent another wave of video channel and data offerings? Will it just add to confusion among consumers and fragmentation of the audience? Or will digital technology end the "passivity" of television viewing? Will it instead create active engagement with what is offered via a PC, or a TV/PC?

The stark and troubling reality is that television broadcasters—and companies in other industries that involve digital technologies—can't sit back and let the issues resolve themselves by simple force of inertia. Instead, broadcasters must define questions and seek answers even though that will happen within limitations set by a host of groups. Broadcasters must respond to the expectations of viewers, program prducers, the "creative community," legislators, affiliates, advertisers, and equipment manufacturers.

Certainly, digital technology will result in an environment with even a vaster array of choices. In this context, how will NBC distinguish its brand, building on relationships with viewers to move them toward interactive applications and online engagements?

The list of concerns is long and agitating. But perhaps this is the opportunity broadcasters have been seeking so we can reevaluate the nature of our business and discard what has bcome obsolete. With eroding audience share and problematic economies, the chance to redefine the NBC brand to "close the loop" with traditional television viewers is arguably the monumental occasion an industry seeks to raise the value of the underlying business to a higher level.

At least for NBC, which has consistently demonstrated agility and excellence within all corridors of our industry, we welcome the transforming opportunity.

—Ken Krushel
Senior Vice President, Strategy
NBC