The World in 2030

254 The World in 2030
vital signs and may well provide front line interventionist
medical care.
Another huge driver of continuous personal environmental
data capture will be business’s need to record its activities for
legal protection but, even more importantly, for a new form
of wealth generation that I call ‘Business Process Intellectual
Capital.’ This clumsy phrase (necessary because we do not
yet have appropriate language for this new concept) refers to
companies recording how they do what they do. For example,
as a company builds a new factory in Mexico, every meeting
with government officials, planners, builders, architects,
environmentalists, labour unions and all other involved
parties will be captured and stored in the company network
of databases. Every component used in the manufacture of
the factory will be communicating its position and condition
to the same databases and every drawing, email, phone call,
text message, etc. will also be stored (all interactively linked
with semantic encoding 473 and automatic updating).
When the project is completed the new factory may have
cost $600 million dollars. But what would be the potential
value of all of that data captured during the building project
to another similar company planning to build a new factory
in Mexico? Clearly there will be a substantial value in such
data and accountancy regulators are now working out how
to value and maintain such ‘Business Process Intellectual
Capital’ before allowing this entirely new form of wealth to
appear on corporate balance sheets.
Such new forms of value will be generated by almost
all organisations, whether they design golf courses,