THE APPROACHING millennium will be noted for many things, but none will be more important than the chasm that will open between the industrial world of the past 300 years and the digital economy now abirthing.

There should be no doubting that a decade of gestation is coming to an end and its impact will be to dramatically change the world, as we know it. Within the next few years we will witness:

• Communication costs falling by several orders of magnitude.
• A constellation of several hundred satellites bringing high-bandwidth communications to businesses, schools and individuals everywhere on the planet.
• One billion people connected to ' the Internet.
• Trillions of dollars of commerce being done over the Internet.
• Software programs, books, databases, newspapers and music CDs no longer requiring packaging and delivering to stores, homes or news kiosks. They will be delivered electronically over the Internet, as are large numbers of airline tickets and securities transactions today.
• Industries such as consulting services, entertainment, banking and insurance, education and health care rapidly adopting the Internet to change the way they do business.
• The Internet being used to order tangible goods and services that are produced, stored and physically delivered. For instance, sales of computers, software, cars, books, flowers and clothing are growing exponentially.
• Anyone in Manitoba being able to take a University degree from Harvard, Stanford or MIT without ever leaving the province.

In recent years, information technology's share of total business equipment expenditure has risen from three per cent in the 1960s to 45 per cent today and still climbing. Workers in IT industries earn close to $46,000 per year, compared to an average of $Z8,000 for the rest of the private sector.

The Internet's pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it. Radio was in existence 38 years before 50 million people tuned in; TV took 13 years to reach

that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC kit came out, 50 million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years.

The Internet and its digital traffic will supplant many thousands of jobs in Manitoba. It is impossible to compete against it using our typical bricks and mortar structures. In a world in which cost differentials as low as 15 per cent spell doom for the laggard, cost advantages of 10 or 100 to one mean certain and rapid obsolescence for our present business and institutional means of competing. For example, to process a travel ticket goes from $8 using an agent to $1 using the Internet and the cost of a banking transaction goes from $1.07 to one cent using the Internet.

The rapid growth of the computing and telecommunications industries has created a large and growing demand for programmers, systems analysts, computer scientists and engineers. As electronic commerce begins to substitute for more conventional sales and services, it will shift employment from traditional occupations to those needed to manage information and, in many instances, other higher level cognitive reasoning abilities. Electronic commerce is very much part of a broader national trend that requires more skills in the workplace and an improved basic education in mathematics and science.

As the digital world continues to exert itself, the composition of the workforce required to produce and deliver a product or service will shift. Workers with the skills to manage information will be needed across the economy. These positions typically require a four-year undergraduate degree, often in a field of science, mathematics or engineering and, in many cases, advanced training or a graduate degree.

For instance, if on-line delivery of news services replaces some portion of the conventionally delivered news, workers will gradually shift away from the printing or delivery of newspapers to the creation of content or managing of computers. Workers manning printing presses, driving trucks, and staffing newsstands have no role in on-line news distribution. Their function is performed here. We either create the jobs formed by new workers responsible and companies or they just don t for programming, operating and happen. maintaining the computer servers that "distribute" the news to Web readers.

The signals transmitted over the Internet do not recognize national borders. Work on the same project can be done in several places or several countries without workers having to physically relocate. Organizations can now deploy resources and operations around the world. Information about new product introductions, corporate earnings, forecasted sales patterns and materials requirements can be shared almost instantaneously via corporate e-mail systems and value-added networks and, now, over the Internet.

There are several important conclusions that we can draw from these observations: If we have a surplus of talent, we can find job opportunities opening for our workers any place in the world. Alternately, if Manitoba has an insufficient supply of skilled workers we will see these high-paying jobs migrate to regions that can supply the needed talent. And finally, the days are numbered when we might expect to see companies moving to our province and creating jobs here. We either create the jobs and companies or they just don't happen.

For Manitoba to compete in this "Brave New World," our institutions must undergo a substantial and a speedy modification that can be led only by government. Some of a long list of changes would include:

• The provincial government must cast itself as a model user of technology from the top. Cabinet ministers and their deputies must work with the technologies and understand and articulate their impacts.
• Governments must use their massive purchasing powers to encourage new and entrepreneurial companies while outsourcing as much as they can to the private sector so that competitive skills can be developed.
• The university and college systems must be rationalized so they can play a much greater part in economic development than is now the case.
• Our economic development and agencies need to be seriously revamped with globally competitive skills-- even if talent needs to be imported at considerable expense.
• An institutional structure such "Innovative Corridor" for the encouragement of new private sector companies needs to be led and funded.
• Other groups - chambers of commerce, consumer and business associations - within the private sector need to be encouraged to co-operate.

While the private sector and other community stakeholders must play a supporting role in meeting the challenges posed, there are no private sector companies that can lead the charge. Of those available, none has the combination of size, resources, interest and vision to do SO.

If we are to change and become competitive, it must come from government and it must be led by, first, the premier and, second, by a department of government headed by a senior minister charged with the responsibilities for the digital economy as recommended by the Manitoba Information Highway Advisory Council. There is no viable alternative. The Working day lives of the 360,000 Manitobans, who work solely with information, are being impacted by the global forces in motion. New companies, new jobs and new skill sets need to be created. We need government focus. We need a minister for the digital economy.