Virtual Integration
Description:
Virtual Integration involves linking different applications, databases, and locally and globally distributed systems in such a way that they work together seamlessly and are easily accessible from a user's perspective. It is the integration through the whole value chain made up of loose affiliations of companies, organised as a network, where physical assets are replaced by information.
Enablers:
- ever more demanding customer requirements: not only concerned with reduced costs and shorter lead times, but also increasingly focused on requirements for product and service offerings tailored to an individual customer’s requirements.
- ever increasing competition: not only because of easier market entry, enabling new entrants to steal significant market share at the expense of unresponsive existing suppliers, but also because e-business now gives opportunities for customers and suppliers to bypass traditional supply chain structures.
- ever increasing volumes and velocity of information: the requirement to gather, process and act on massively increasing volumes of information in a rapid and intelligent manner.
Inhibitors:
- Extending the retirement age to another 10 years so people will have to work more
Paradigms:
There has been enormous concern about the consequences of human population growth for the environment and for social and economic development. But this growth is likely to come to an end in the foreseeable future.
Experts:
United Nations US Department of Health and Human Services
Timing:
Improving on earlier methods of probabilistic forecasting, here we show that there is around an 85 per cent chance that the world's population will stop growing before the end of the century. There is a 60 per cent probability that the world's population will not exceed 10 billion people before 2100, and around a 15 per cent probability that the world's population at the end of the century will be lower than it is today. For different regions, the date and size of the peak population will vary considerably.