Andrew Neil giving the keynote address at World Workplace Europe in Glasgow yesterday

Delegates gathered at the landmark Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow yesterday for the flagship event of the facilities management calendar. Keynote speaker Andrew Neil, Editor-in-chief of The Scotsman and Sunday Business, set the forward-looking tone of the conference by focusing on the challenge of 'Doing Business in the Information Age'.

Dismissing the fate of a few high profile dot.com companies as irrelevant to the underlying and profound impact of the Internet, Neil said the scale and relentless nature of change was different from previous ‘industrial’ revolutions: "This time there’ll be no peaks, no periods of quiet, just continuous waves of change lapping against companies. You don’t know where the competition will come from tomorrow but it’s most likely to come from outside your sector."

Companies needed to consider unprecedented collaboration with those they had previously considered their enemies, said Neil. E-commerce will accelerate the outsourcing trend as companies develop relationships with suppliers, ending vertical integration: "Perhaps 90% of white collar jobs will go or be changed out of all recognition, through e-procurement, global outsourcing and contracting."

He criticised continental European governments for being overly protective: "The obsession with protecting existing jobs in Europe means we’ve forgotten how to create them. Look at the US, the country that fires most, hires most." Neil predicted that e-commerce will make regional trading blocs such as the EU irrelevant.

Human resource management was crucial, said Neil, but received little attention: "In the information age, human resources are the only ones you can have. The individual will become the core business unit. People complain of skill shortages but there is no lack of talent at companies which are great places to work."

In an age when technical capability is taken for granted, design and brand are the differentiators, as important to services as products. Challenging the fashionable 'customer is king' philosophy, Neil said: "If you listen only to your customers you will get only incremental change - the enemy of real innovation"