Present and future pressures on service operators

When I was younger, I was never patient with my elders when they would talk about the ‘good old days’ and tell me how much better things were when they were themselves young. Recently, though, I have found myself occasionally being nostalgic about the past; like the first grey hair, this is a disturbing symptom, and I have been trying to pin down what I am really thinking when I say something like, ‘Things were easier ten or twenty years ago’. I would personally sooner be alive now than at any other time—I don't share Gibbon's preference for the age of Diocletian, or the more common nostalgia for the recent days when most of the map was coloured red—and what I think lies at the bottom of any regrets for our dear departed past is a feeling that decision‐making, policy formulation and any similar activity involving making guesses about the future is a more difficult exercise now that it used to be. One reason for this is obviously that things can change more rapidly nowadays—oil costs increase overnight, the pound can dive downwards, governments totter—which is to some extent a function of the increased ease and rapidity of communication, reactions to events in the world being speeded up by telecommunications. Another reason is that we now have very much more information available to us which is of possible relevance to our decision making. These factors influence us to some extent whether we are taking purely personal and domestic decisions, like deciding where to spend the holidays or what to do with our savings, if any, or whether we are deciding how to run our own, or our employer's or the country's business. Two of the factors which are increasingly influencing the operations of secondary service producers are the advent of more rapid and diverse forms of communication, and the constant growth in the volume of information. Why I have been saying this is to show that most of the pressures which affect or will affect secondary services are not specific to those services, but are more general, in that they are pressures which to some extent affect all the parts of the information world and indeed the whole of our present society.