Trends Identified
Environment
To stabilise the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm), which was the target set by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will cost $542 billion per year, every year till 2030, according to the World Energy Outlook (WEO).
2012
The future
Steria
Business models
A lot has happened in the past few years to shake-up the historical assumptions that underpin companies and their business models. The global economic meltdown and lingering sovereign debt crisis are foremost amongst these changes, which have combined with issues surrounding global climate change, the price of oil, energy and food and longer and more complex supply chains, even access to talent during the downturn84. The result, in short, has been a sea change, against which Chief Executives (CEOs) have seized upon creativity as the necessary life raft for their organisations.
2012
The future
Steria
Technology
Technology has powered much of the convergence in the world’s economies and provided the know-how. It has provided access to global markets for those moving from feudal and agricultural economies to the more valuable industrial, service and intellectual property economies. The internet has expanded to reach 2.1 billion people today and is expected to reach five billion people across the planet by 2020. The raw materials of today’s technology are not inexhaustible and indium, used in liquid-crystal displays, and hafnium, a critical element for next-generation semiconductors, could be exhausted by 2017. Technology is driving the conception of new business models and is set to continue its disruptive and enabling role in the coming decades. When once employees had access to the best technology at work, today it’s more likely that their technology at home or in their hand is superior to their employers. Increasingly, companies are looking to ‘outsource’ personal technologies to their employees enabling them to use their own mobile technologies at work.
2012
The future
Steria
Work
Work itself is changing, with new jobs coming on-stream that didn’t exist ten years ago, as a direct consequence of urbanisation, increasing life expectancy, new technologies, globalisation and climate change. To maintain our workforce we will increasingly hire women, the aged and disabled people and probably have three generations of employees in our firms for the first time in any numbers. The diversity of our workforce and the roles we will ask them to perform, in massively changing circumstances, will put even greater stress on them than they experience today. The direct costs related to stress at work are now estimated to be as high as four percent of EU GDP.
2012
The future
Steria
Outsourcing
As we gain in confidence in being able to collaborate effectively with outside firms and individuals, we are letting go of functions and processes that were once considered essential to retain in-house, increasingly outsourcing them to others to manage for us. Innovation and creativity are two areas where we will invite others to help us more and more, through means such as Engineering R&D outsourcing or through crowdsourcing, where we invite many people to help us discover our next product or service offering.
2012
The future
Steria
Regulation and legislation
Ageing and environmental laws are likely to shape much future regulation and legislation at least within the European Union.
2012
The future
Steria
Government
Due to massive public debt governments are recognising that they can no longer afford generous pensions and the European Union Commission has said that the average retirement age across the 27 member countries needs to rise from 60 today to 70 by 2060. Governments are rapidly turning to the ‘Cloud’ to service the needs of their citizens and today EU citizens can access 82 percent of basic public services online. The working population will start shrinking from 2012 and unless a dramatic change in migration policy is forthcoming, companies will have to deal with the consequences of older workers and fewer workers in the labour pool in the EU. The EU is setting policies towards car-free cities in Europe by 2050. This could be a boom or bust strategy. On the one-hand it may lead to innovation and the rise of cleantech and on the other it may put off investment and inward migration of companies. We will see.
2012
The future
Steria
Demographic changes
The last few decades have experienced social change on a remarkable scale. In particular there have been extraordinary gains in longevity in developed countries, with average life expectancy at birth rising from 66 years in 1950 to just over 76 years in 2007 (United Nations 2007). This has had, and will continue to have, far-reaching implications for the composition of families. Meanwhile, the last few decades have also seen signi cant falls in fertility rates. Birth rates have declined sharply across developed countries generally. In 1950, the total fertility rate (TFR), i.e. the average number of children being born per woman, was 2.8, but by 2007 the TFR had fallen to 1.6, leaving many OECD countries well below the fertility rate of 2.1 per woman needed to replace the population at a constant level.
2011
The Future of Families to 2030
OECD
Society and social trends
Just as population trends over a 20-year period tend to move quite slowly (with notable exceptions such as immigration) and are not on the aggregate susceptible to abrupt major changes of direction, societal trends also tend to develop their own momentum and can prove quite difficult to defect from past and current trajectories. The expansion of higher education, the growing participation of women in the labour market and the rising numbers of dependent elderly all seem set to become a permanent feature of the next couple of decades, although their combined effect on family formation, family interaction and intergenerational relations is hard to foresee. Conversely, future patterns of marriage and divorce or labour market participation among the elderly have the potential to spring some surprises in the years ahead.
2011
The Future of Families to 2030
OECD
Technology
New technologies can be expected to affect future family structures and interrelations in several ways. Firstly, progress in medical technologies has in the past made important contributions to extending people’s lives, and further advances can be expected in the years ahead, pushing life expectancies to new heights and significantly increasing the numbers of elderly. Secondly, information and communication technologies (ICT) have vast potential to enhance the lives of the sick, the infirm and the elderly by increasing or restoring their autonomy, particularly in the home, and enabling them to participate more actively in family life, not least in the role of carer and/or educator. Thirdly, distance working and distance learning are set to increase considerably in the coming years, as broadband availability and usage intensify and more companies, organisations and institutions avail themselves of the benefits offered by these technologies. As take-up increases so too will the opportunities for families to organise their working and learning lives more flexibly in ways that are better aligned to their needs. And finally, over the next 20 years the much anticipated expansion of social networking will almost certainly have consequences – often unexpected – for family interrelationships and interaction, in some cases enhancing them, in others perhaps hampering them.
2011
The Future of Families to 2030
OECD