Network information services THE EMERGING NETWORK MARKETPLACE

by Herbert S. Dordick, Helen G. Bradley, and Burt Nanus

Ablex Publishing Co, Norwood, NJ, 1881,384pp

For readers of Telecommunications Policy, this book divides into two halves. The first half, consisting of Parts I, II, and III, is an elementary introduction to communications net- works of the sort that the authors call NIS, or network information services. The second half contains reports on some useful research about the condi- tions for and rate of adoption of such services particularly in the USA.

The first half will be familiar material to readers of Telecommunications Policy. It will be useful to them as a reference to give to students and to colleagues who are not professionals in telecommunications but need to know something about it. They will learn about such matters as bit rates, circuit switching and packet switching, star, tree and distributed networks, LSI and VLSI, microprocessors and microcom- puters, specialized common carriers, universal service, interconnection, common carrier regulation, etc. But the readers of this journal may well wish to skip that material and go directly to Part IV.

Straw man In the latter half of the book, three empirical studies of NIS use are re- ported. All are designed to help answer a question that the authors pose, namely why did optimistic projections of the late 1960s of a wired nation with computers in every home providing banking, shopping, education and elec- tronic mails not yet come to pass. Per- haps this question is a bit of a straw man. Certainly one can quote such blue sky projections, but one can also chal- lenge the proposition that they were a consensus among knowledgeable people. That, however, does not

matter very much. Whether faster or slower than any given prophet pro- jected, we are moving towards increas- ing use of information networks. Any research that explores the likely rate of growth of the market for these is important. Anyone in the telecom- munications field should want to be aware of what Dordick, Bradley and Nanus found.

One of their three studies is a Delphi among experts in the field. Another is a canvass of network information ser- vices that now exist and how they are developing. The third is a small market survey in the Los Angeles area about reactions of ordinary people to possible future home information services.

Delphi study

The Delphi study polled experts about which services had good chances of adoption and what the likely degree of penetration would be by 1980, 1985, 1998, and 1995. It also asked about the need characteristics of terminal equip- ment and who would be likely to pro- vide the necessary financing for large- scale diffusion of the networks and their terminals. The Delphi also covered the likely regulatory environ- ment, concerns about privacy and security, the role of competition, and the factors favouring and inhibiting such uses as word processing, elec- tronic mail, electronic funds transfer, etc. The results are presented in some detail in Appendix A. At some points there are interesting comparisons be- tween the present Delphic responses and those obtained by Paul Baran in a 1971 Delphi exercise. On many points the future is receding somewhat as we approach it, but on others it is coming on us even faster than earlier expected.

Reliable prophecy A Delphi is, of course, no more than the consensus of knowledgeable people at any point in time. It reflects their shared illusions as well as their shared knowledge. But there is good reason to view it as a more reliable prophecy than the judgments of any

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY March 1982

Book reviews

one of the experts picked at random. It is, therefore, a useful check against one’s own thinking. That is what the Delphi process is for. It forces one to face up to the fact that one’s own assumptions may not be persuasive to others. Certainly five years from now it will be easy to pick particular figures that the present forecasters come up with and make fun of them, but anyone making market decisions about infor- mation services now would be foolish not to look at the concensus guesses of his colleagues about the way things are moving.

The canvass of existing information services fills a gap in the non- proprietary literature. There will be occasional surprises in it for almost every reader, since the variety of information services has grown well beyond what any of us is likely to know. People working on EFI are not likely to know about a Texas database on child abuse, and those who know about the latter are perhaps unfamiliar with bank ‘repos’.

Confidence The Los Angeles study involved 325 telephone interviews with randomly selected respondents. The 40 questions measured willingness to adopt elec- tronic transactions in banking, shop- ping and mail. Comparisons were avail- able between these 1977 results and some earlier market surveys. The main findipg of the present study is that confidence in computer reliability was the most important factor in deter- mining acceptability of electronic transaction services, and that age, sex, and concern for privacy were other sig- nificant factors. Appendix B presents the results of this survey in some detail.

The book as a whole is readable by and useful to the uninitiated reader. Specialists will find the market infor- mation useful. Those who want to delve into that information deeply will find in the two appendices detailed data to work on.

lthiel de Sola Pool, Massachusetts lnsfitute of

Techndogy, Cambridge, MA, USA

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