International communication toward 2010.

It's hard to imagine the international business environment changing as much in the next 16 years as it has in the last 16.

Yet the rapid moves we've seen, particularly in the way we share information, should be viewed as an evolution rather than a trend. As professional communicators, our ability to keep pace with this progression will help determine the role we will assume within business management in the year 2010.

The future of corporate communication also will depend on the continued development of our industry's primary resource -- its people.

As we deliver our messages to increasingly splintered audiences today, we are confronted with an environment in which signals bouncing off satellites give viewers around the world a front seat to war, and newspaper reports in one country can ruin a company's best-laid plans in another. Our jobs have certainly become more complex.

Looking ahead, though, communicators need to be careful not to let the technology within our profession take over and become the end rather than the means. By the year 2010, it is conceivable that face-to-face interaction will be largely unnecessary. Our ability to see each other through our telephones andcreate and send documents from anywhere we like via computer modems and portable fax machines could easily render meetings and frequent business travel redundant.

Without doubt, this improved efficiency will reap significant dividends, and business managers will expect the communication function to use the necessary tools to effectively deliver their messages. However, they also may look to us to deliver the "human" side of an increasingly insular environment.

In the last decade, our industry has, by necessity, evolved from an instinctively run, contact-driven publicity business to a more complex, strategy-oriented function. At the same time, it has continued to be measured by the same yardstick -- results. Although the tools we use to get those results are changing, it will continue to be the people in our industry who determine our future. The written word, good judgment and common sense will never be replaced by hardware.

Set sights higher to meet future demand

That being said, we must make considerable strides to stay ahead of the game in the future. As the information age evolves further, the value of communication will increase for all kinds of organizations. Those who can articulate their messages in this sophisticated environment will succeed, while others will struggle.

As consultants, our clients 10 years ago were usually directors of communication, public relations or marketing. Today, our clients are commonly executive vice-presidents or CEOs. In leading corporations, the communication function has moved upward and toward the centre. That trend will continue unless we fail to provide the necessary training and development to put our people there.

Improving the quality of our people needs to be a priority, and one answer would be the creation of an international training program. To make it happen, agencies and major employers of communicators would need to be prepared tocooperate and invest a percentage of their budgets with the aim of elevating the standards of our industry.

By 2010, the chief communication officer will sit beside the chief executive officer, the chief information officer and the chief financial officer. She or he will have an integral role in steering the organization.

Because of this, the communicator of 2010 will work under much closer scrutiny than today, and that is something for which we need to prepare.

We are all aware of some doubtful communication practices in recent times. While these incidents have been isolated, they hurt all of us. As our influenceincreases, we will be held much more accountable for the counsel we provide, the strategies we prepare and the statements we make.

In other words, someone will have to police the business, to build and maintain the function's credibility and respectability. If we don't effectively regulate ourselves, someone else will do it for us.

A code of ethics and best practice, such as IABC's, must have teeth so we can develop recognized, accepted professional standards. As communicators take a seat in the executive boardroom and we ply our skills alongside lawyers, chartered accountants and research analysts, we will have to enhance our industry's reputation as a profession rather than simply a service.

As part of that process, we also will have to create a method of evaluation that enables clients or managers to determine whether our work has been effective from one project, one agency and even one country to the next.

The path to 2010 will be enormously challenging, exciting and gratifying for communicators. But we have much to do to prepare.

THE MEGASTATE

The developed world will converge in several key ways:

* Nation-states will coalesce into megastates -- massive confederations with many common economic rules, synchronized foreign policies, and joint military forces. These will not be as centralized as the U.S., but will fall somewhere between Canada and the current European Economic Community in degree of central power.

* Individual nations will cede much of their power over currencies, trade, commercial laws, movement of people, foreign policy, and strategic military forces.

* Within large nations, power will decentralize, with such former nations as Scotland or the Basque provinces gaining at least as much power as U.S. states.

* Developed nations will share common problems of population decline, immigration pressure, social turmoil, environmental issues, growth conflicts, and welfare-state difficulties (especially a need to restructure health-care systems).

Megastate organizations will dominate the economic sphere. Issues such as currency, control of financial markets and capital, and control of people can be resolved only at the international level. What we don't think of as individualnations will end up being more like states of a confederation. The closest thing to a prototype is the European Economic Community (EEC) for the creation of a single market in which trade, capital, and workers will flow freely across the borders of the EEC's 12 member states. This step is to be followed by the creation of a solitary European central bank, a common currency, and, in due time, political union.

Chris Bunting, ABC, is chairman and chief executive officer of Continental PIR Communications, Toronto.