ARTICLES AND EXCERPTS

we have had the pleasure of working with Peter Cochrane, until December 2000 Chief technologist of British Telecom and "guru" forward thinker about our new world where ICT - Information and Communication Technologies - are now having major impacts. Peter writes a regular column ( 'Hard Drive') for The Daily Telegraph's weekly "Connected" ICT supplement and speaks regularly at conferences around the world. He is now a partner of conceptlabs http://www.conceptlabs.net/biography.html

Here are a handful of extracts from - and links to - Peter's many articles :

Book Chapter from Masters of The Wired World, Oxford University Press, For the Financial Times, 1999. Peter Cochrane, Chief Technologist, British Telecom "For millennia we have lived in a world dominated by atoms, where natural physical boundaries have defined the limits of human expedition and development. The majority of our understanding, knowledge and experience has been gained in this bounded, slow moving, and dominantly random environment. Our society, commercial and governmental frameworks have evolved slowly to meet the limited needs of this world, and nothing much changed for hundreds of years. Today our world is dominated by bits, with a global grid of on-line information, experience and commerce that has no form, few constraints, and virtually no limits. It is a world devoid of control, something new, naturally chaotic, and very fast to react and change."

See Peter's site at http://www.petercochrane.net/downloads/

Can healthcare cope with the California Syndrome? R4 Magazine, Vol 1/1, April 98. p43. http://www.labs.bt.com/library/cochrane/papers/

"Early in the new century the number of people needing healthcare and support will more than double, whilst the number of potential carers and those gainfully employed will fall. Worse still, we may see most people failing to provide adequately for a longer period of old age, and siblings refusing to pick up the tab. And all brought about by a combination of demographic change, falling education standards, and our expectation to live longer. We already suffer the California Syndrome; expecting treatment no matter what the cost, and see death as an unnatural act.

How are a diminishing band of healthcare professionals to cope in a world of exponentially growing customer expectation and demand, when resources and funding will at best remain static, and most likely fall? No doubt clinicians and carers will continue to refine their techniques and processes to become ever more efficient, whilst administrators desperately cut corners, shave costs, reduce bed occupancy, and push patients back into the community ever faster. But none of this will stem the tide of demand and the growing inability to respond. Something radical is required to change a paradigm that has fundamentally been in stasis for over a century. Compared to leading industries the Healthcare appears to be in desperate need of change."