Technology trends watcher and forecaster Daniel Burrus, of Milwaukee-based Burrus Research, is the keynote speaker at FS/TEC 2008 this week at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. He recently spoke with Nation’s Restaurant News about some of concepts he’ll address there, as well as about other topics of interest to foodservice operators. An edited excerpt of that conversation follows.
NRN: Can you paint in very broad strokes a picture of two or three of the topics you’ll address for the FS/TEC audience?
BURRUS: [One is that] we are just about to get a perfect storm of technology-driven change, and it’s going to cause mass disruption/opportunities in many industries. It’s really not very complex about what is driving this storm. It’s things that you and I have been reading about or talking about for quite a while. For instance, the [growth in the] processing power of computers. Unlike the ’80s, ’90s and even into the year 2000 and 2001, when a graph [of processing power growth] would have been pretty flat, all of a sudden it is starting to sweep up dramatically. [Regarding] the Sony PlayStation [3] put up for sale a year ago–had that been sold four years earlier it would have cost multimillions of dollars and been called a super computer. Another part of that perfect storm is bandwidth [or data transfer speeds]; its [growth] graph is steeper than processing power. And then if you look at storage–the ability to store information–that graph is steeper than the other two. And remember the price keeps going down. This is giving us some amazing capabilities. The price point of doing something like [wireless, handheld order-taking terminals with photo display capabilities] would have been insane a few years ago.
NRN: What is the most interesting story about a business thinking outside of the box you’ve encountered in recent months?
BURRUS: I was speaking to CEOs of some of the biggest oil companies. One of the CEOs speaking before I got up, said: “One of our biggest problems is that we cannot protect our off-shore oil platforms from hurricanes. It causes billions of dollars a year in damage. And we also can’t protect them from terrorists.” I said, “Actually you could protect against all of those things. You could put them [the platforms] on the bottom of the sea.” You couldn’t have done that three years ago, four years ago, eight years ago or 10 years ago, but today you can. About 85 percent of the people on those platforms are there to serve other people. And the 15 percent of the people you do need can be undersea robots that exist today. They got back to me a couple of months later and said: “Hey, you’re right. We can do that.” And in another four or five years you’ll see the first one introduced. It is important for all of us in business to step back and look at what I call, the “new big picture” because sometimes the answers are not in the obvious place.
NRN: Given the current economic turbulence, is now a good time to invest in new technologies or processes?
BURRUS: I don’t want to be [just] keeping up. I want to gain some sort of competitive advantage and that can come from technology. It doesn’t necessarily have to be new technology, it might be a better use of my old technology… I want to realize that it doesn’t matter if the economy is going up or down, if I plan to be in business over the next five, 10 or 15 years and doing it profitably, I need to be thinking strategically and I need to be seeking advantage, regardless.