boring jobs can be done by machines. What's left are jobs which need craftsmanship, which need communications skills, which need love of what you're doing.' When he's not secluded away on Agar's Island with his cell phone switched off, Bermuda resident James Martin is hopping around the world talking to executives about how they can get wired in this age of connectivity.

Seclusion and writing seem to be his game these days as he creates his bit of bucolic paradise on Agar's complete with a couple of man-made ponds.

One can liken him to a modern day version of a Thoreau with a computer and a high speed connection. Mr. Martin, head of international consultancy james martin co. and the author of 100 books, is a natural choice to discuss technology issues as the luncheon speaker at the World Insurance Forum on Wednesday.

In its 25th anniversary issue, Computerworld ranked Martin fourth among 25 people who have most influenced the world of computing.

His speech, "A tsunami of change is on the horizon'', will hit on some key notes industry executives are attempting to play in this age of globalisation.

Staying connected with staff and customers at a variety of far flung offices is a key challenge for companies like ACE Ltd. and XL Capital Ltd. as they grow rapidly. New technology, especially in the field of computer insurance modelling techniques, and electronic commerce are other key areas.

Mr. Martin believes the strategic use of all the technology at a company's disposal will determine the eventual winners in the race for corporate survival. He calls such a progressive organisation a "cybercorp'', the title of his 100th book, which has a cover featuring a giant wave set to crash down on the observer.

Mr. Martin said he attempts in his writings to track the transformation of industry and society in the computer age as a means of advising businesses on how to approach change. He is currently working on a book which looks at the social consequences of the age of the cybercorp and which predicts how the world will look 20 years from now.

In Cybercorp: The Next Giant Step in the Evolution of the Corporate World, (AMACOM, American Management Association, New York, 1996), Mr. Martin says the next step in corporate evolution is the agile, virtual, global, cybernetic organisation with computer-linked partnerships. These companies need to be fluid and fast-learning so they don't need to be constantly reengineered every time executives suddenly wake up and realise they've become too slow and clunky.

"All business people need to `think cybercorp'', Mr. Martin says in describing the theme of the book. "They need to think of business reinvented for today's technology -- with value streams designed for real-time interaction, virtual operations, radically changed marketing, and agile intercorporate relationships.

"There will be a total reinvention of employment and the changed nature of work requires new patterns of management, new organisational structures and a new human-technology partnership.'' The cybercorp revolution describes a trend in which more and more business procedures become encoded in systems software. A cybercorp uses the principles of cybernetics -- "the science of control and communication in a corporation''.

His constant message is that most of today's corporations are structured by obsolete thinking. Few executives calculate the enormous costs of remaining with inefficient processes. While deep structural changes are necessary, the waves of corporate re-engineering has so far been a disaster.

The Internet and new uses of computing will bring new forms of competition, he said. Computer-aided competition will wipe out profit margins in some sectors as buyers have an easier time searching for the best and lowest cost provider.

The technology allows the smallest to compete with the largest.

A key question for executives everywhere is: "What strategies lead to ruinously intense competition and what lead to high profits or growth?'' And Mr. Martin believes we're just on the cusp of the computing wave, one that's taken half a century to build, and is only now reaching what he calls its infancy.

"Computing does not start to become mature until an age of network-centric computing in which computers around the world can intercommunicate and share resources,'' he stated. "That is now beginning to happen and will be fuelled by explosive growth of the Internet combined with the rapid spread of fibre-optic communications. In the past computing has been driven by Moore's Law; in the future it will be driven by new forces, including fibre-optics doubling in capability every two years.'' And among all this tangle of concepts, computer systems, networks, and information, the human will still hold the supreme position in the organisation. That is what executives should never forget.

The technology should take the burden off the backs of humans, Mr. Martin said. So many jobs these days are being done by humans but should be done by computers. The personal computer will become truly personal, unlike today.

These new interconnected computers will have a deep intricate understanding of their owners' unique needs. In such a world the balance between what machines can do and what humans can do will shift in startling ways.

"My new book will trace the various chain reactions and what happens if these chain reactions go to their logical conclusion -- which they will do,'' Mr.

Martin said. "Human issues will become much more important.

"What technology does is take away the human drudgery. The jobs which are boring jobs can be done by machines. What's left are jobs which need craftsmanship, which need communications skills, which need love of what you're doing.'' Mr. Martin, who has lived in Bermuda for more than 20 years, was originally from Ashby-de-la-Zouch in the UK. He received his Master's degree in physics from Oxford University in 1959 but became fascinated by the computer industry and joined International Business Machines Corp. (IBM).

After 18 years at IBM, where he specialised in database design for large corporations, he left to pursue consulting and writing. His first book, Programming Real Time Computing Systems, was published in 1963 and since then he has continued to produce them at regular intervals, sometimes two a year.

In 1978 he bought a home at Tucker's Town and formed two companies, Knowledge Ware, and James Martin and Associates. In 1983 he started work on computerising the mapping out and writing the coding necessary to run other software. The breakthrough software was called Computer Aided Systems Engineering (CASE).

James Martin & Associates was eventually bought out by Texas Instruments, and Knowledge Ware by Sterling.

The work at Tucker's Town created a whole new discipline known as information engineering, those who computerise business processes.

Martin His company james martin co. is a consultancy which helps businesses strategically use technology. This means reorganising the business around their critical processes then using the technology to deliver the product to the customer.

The company is also focusing on designing fixes for the Year 2000 computer problem, a glitch that could cost companies millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Mr. Martin was a member of the software Scientific Advisory Board to the US Department of Defence, and has a chair at Oxford. The James Martin Chair of Computing at Oxford University is concerned with advancing the frontiers of system development.