This comment from Knowledge@Wharton intrigued me:

In some ways the Internet is still more significant as a cultural phenomenon than as the basis for new ways of doing business.

One way of looking at culture is as a set of distinctive customs and patterns of behaviour. That is only at the surface level, and at a deeper level culture is about the way that we expect to solve problems which may include practical needs or the way that we deal with other people.

In this second sense, if the internet is a cultural phenomena then at some point it will inevitably alter the way that business is done. It cannot be otherwise since culture is simply one way of describing the kind of people we are and the way we do things.

There are one or two other aspects to this. The internet is a global phenomena. That means that this technology of information and communication is presenting a common global context for human interaction. People of disparate cultures and geographies are interacting, increasingly in real time, in a medium that presents a common structure. Will this have the effect of blurring the boundaries between cultures, or of imposing one culture on all others, a MacDonaldisation of virtual space? I think this is unlikely. Human nature has a way of bursting out of fixed constraints in surprising ways. There will always be local expressions of culture and ways of doing things. With the internet however, these local expressions are not geographically located. Instead of physical space providing a locus, it will be interests, tasks, and functions that provide the locus of culture for an interconnected society.

Another aspect that needs mentioning is that in terms of the implementation of information technology we are still at an early stage. I see three distinct stages to the introduction of any new technology. During the first stage the new technology enables the improvement of existing processes. These processes are component parts of some overall organisational objective. A second stage can be indentified in which the processes themselves begin to evolve and transform in conformity with the nature of the technology. The third stage is reached when the organisation and its fundamental objectives are transformed according to the nature of the new operating environment in which the technology has become embedded.

Going back to the starting point of the internet as a cultural phenomena, the way that business is carried out and the way that many other human interactions are carried out will be massively effected by the internet. The reason that is not yet the case is that we are little further than the first stage in the implementation of information technology. Some of our processes are indeed being transformed, but it will still be some time before the full implications for the way that we organise ourselves and the very goals and objectives that we work for will also be transformed.