ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a few of the key emerging logistics-oriented information technologies — how they are impacting individual consumers, how they are being used by companies to create competitive advantage, how, in short, they are altering the present and forming the future. Throughout the developed world, the culture of change is taking root and shaping the way we think, plan, make, sell, service and structure our organizations and value-added networks. Consider the words of Alvin Toffler who writes about the human-like potential of expert systems, which he refers to as Value-Added Networks. Some neural networks, for example, are intelligent enough to narrow or widen themselves as a function of how much electronic traffic they find pulsing through their systems. Corporate Virtual Workspaces, websites and networks, expert systems, electronic data interchanges, image processing, Internet these are the elements of the information infrastructure that promise to change the way we conduct business in the post-capitalist age.
