HOW TECHNOLOGY HAS CHANGED THE FACE OF BUSINESS FOR TODAY AND FOR THE FUTURE.

By Jeffery Nevil

Feb 2015

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INTRODUCTION

In the modern era the way in which the world does business has changed

almost unrecognisably from days of yore. Technological advancements,

globalisation and shifting working practises have all combined to make

business in 2015 a wildly different proposition to that which we’d consider

the norm even as recently as just 20 years ago but just how far have we

come and what is the price we pay for this progress?

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WHERE WE WERE

Tracing back the roots of what we know as the modern office environment

extends as far back as the 18th century when the industrial revolution was

rapidly changing the face of human history by massively increasing

efficiency through machanising processes which in turn resulted in there

being a greater level of associated administration. One of the earliest

examples of a purpose built office complex to house workers was the

opulent East India House constructed in London’s Leadenhall Street in

1729 as the headquarters for the East India Company which governed

British India at the time. It had become apparent that the effective

organisation of an entire empire required a great deal of clerical work and

if this were all centralised it made the operation run that much more

smoothly.

This large scale purpose built structure for the East India Company

essentially paved the way for the many millions of office blocks that house

organisations of all varieties the world over today, and in fact the original

site of East India House is now occupied by the 80s built Grade I listed

Lloyd’s Building, which is one of London’s most iconic office complexes.

By the time of East India House’s demolition in 1860 a new technological

advancement that would shape future business was taking off as

commercial telegraphy gave companies a means to communicate over

long distances. This in turn gave way to telephony by the start of the 20th

century and with telephone services enabling international voice

communication, businesses were suddenly able to significantly improve the

efficiency of their operations across multiple sites and territories.

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With these much improved global communciation

networks organisations began to expand more

rapidly, giving rise to the multinational

conglomerates and corporations that we know

today, each occupying commercial office space

with square footage in the millions worldwide.

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THE PACE OF CHANGE

It is difficult to quantify the pace of various changes that have effected how

we do business today but it's certainly fair to say that advancements in

technology and working practices seen in my own lifetime (and I'm in my

50s) have been as dramatic and significant as any seen in the preceding

100 years.

When I took on my first office job working for a well-known financial services

company in the late 1970s the landscape was very different indeed to what

is commonplace throughout today's office spaces. For a start desktop

computers didn't exist! In fact the first computer I came into contact with

took up the space of an entire room and even a major international Fortune

500 company such as the one I was employed by wouldn't have more than

two or three across any one site, and I was in an office block housing well

over 1,000 staff!

What's more the beating heart of offices of the time would be the busy post

room (or mailroom in the US), which would often employ scores of people

just to organise and redistribute both internal and external mail. Even into

the turn of the century post rooms were a common sight in offices across

the world whereas today they are close to being completely obsolete in all

but the largest of organisations that haven't quite made the switch to full

digital communications, or those with a need for physical distribution of

packages.

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But it's not just post rooms that have seen their departmental numbers

decimated by technological change, and processing power coupled with

complex software functionality have led to more and more roles being

rendered obsolete by computer programs. Where once the purchasing

department for a big organisation would require leagues of number

crunching operatives to keep on top of who needed what, from where, at

what cost and by when, your average multi-site business or even public

sector operation can now depend upon eProcurement software to manage

all of this for you with minimal human input. And on the other side of the

fence automated eSourcing is taking the work from the flesh and blood folk

who'd have traditionally dealt with the ever decreasing number of

procurement professionals to supply the wares their companies sought.

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HOW FAR WE’VE COME

There are so many examples of devices and concepts which have

revolutionised the world of work that it can be hard to pick the most

important but certainly the following can all lay claim to being as significant

as any advances one could point to as a game changer over the past 20 or

30 years:

COMPUTERS – From the unwieldy mammoth constructions that occupied

entire floors of buildings in the 1970s they are now smaller, cheaper, more

powerful and entirely ubiquitous in every modern day work environment. In

2015 a desk without a computer is like a book without pages.

THE INTERNET – Where do you even start with this still

confusing concept that we all so readily depend upon today?

From humble beginnings the Internet has completely

revolutionised communications and everyday access to knowledge.

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E-MAIL – Going hand in hand with the almost limitless potential of

connectivity that the Internet gave us, in one fell swoop e-mail completely

destroyed the need for the now archaic system of internal mail and memos

that had been the office standard for the preceding century.

DIGITAL FILING – A more recent phenomenon but one that really can’t be

underestimated in terms of its importance in shaping where business will

head tomorrow, digital filing continues to shrink the amount of physical

space required by organisations storing files and documents. Just like post

room jobs have all but disappeared from situations vacant columns, so too

the humble filing clerk now finds itself as a job title that’s all but forgotten.

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HOW CHANGE HAS ENABLED SMALLER OUTFITS TO COMPETE WITH THE BIG BOYS

Whilst much of what I've touched on above focuses on how much

technology has enabled large scale businesses to expand and develop, it's

also important to recognise just how much these advances have similarly

enabled smaller operations and bedroom enterprises to boom

Where once the administration of a

distribution network would necessitate

multiple staff and space to house them,

there are now hundreds of thousands of

online retailers which can operate with

as few as one or two people staffing their

entire worldwide operation. E-commerce

payment systems allow your website to

securely process online payments, your

inventory can be stored off site and

handled by a third party logistics and

distribution handler and your financial

reporting software keeps an eye on your

operating income and expenditure,

helping you stay on top of the bottom line.

As overheads and operational

costs come down, more and

more businesses can co-exist in

any one competitive space so

there’s no reason one man with

a vision can’t go head to head

with a globally dominant super

brand.

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ARE WE LOSING MORE JOBS THAN WE CREATE?

Whilst the luddites who (rightly) feared for their jobs as the mechanisation

of the textiles industry in the early 19th Century saw machines replace

artisans and labourers en masse, took to extreme measures which were

ultimately fruitless when it came to trying to stop the pace of progress,

history has actually shown that for all the labour intensive work that was

lost to men and women, a great many more new roles were created off the

back of this rapidly expanding new industrialised world of automation. We

can today look back at this tremendously important era of human history

as integral to the society in which we today exist, making these future

fearing folk smashing machinery look rather foolish in their antics. And

perhaps this is why today we don't tend to see disgruntled office workers

routinely taking hammers to their laptops in order that they preserve their

own worth to an organisation by virtue of taking out their biggest

competition: the microchip.

But should we be more concerned? After all shareholders and board

directors are rarely going to shun the idea of making company cost savings

through replacing resource hungry living, breathing, flawed human beings

with far less volatile workers powered by algorithms and electricity. Where

does this leave the workers, the men and women at the coalface doing the

dog work that was once integral to an operation's continued success?

Thankfully there are signs that the march of machines and their complex

software solutions isn't yet ready to do away with us all and for all the flaws

of humans and their propensity for error, so too do we possess what is

perhaps the single most important element of all, in our simple ability to

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think like our fellow man. For as long as the world is selling to people, and

not to machines, we will forever require the ability to analyse, assess and

endeavour to fully understand the needs of what every single organisation

under the Sun to this day needs more than anything else in order to exist,

survive and prosper: the consumer.

So this is where technology

and the human brain can

most happily co-exist. In

much the same way as the

computer you are sitting at

right now required input

from you to get to position

in which you find yourself

reading this very

document, a focus group

using a conference voting

system offers a similar

blending of man and

machine as users provide valuable feedback on a given product or service

by giving their thoughts through the hooked up technology that helps to

input those same thoughts into a system that can further analyse and

understand the data. We have not been rendered obsolete just yet.

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CONCLUSION

For all the recognisable traits of a business in the modern age - the open

plan office space, the globally reaching communication networks and the

suited up salesman pushing products to the people, there are even more

elements to modern business that are so far removed from what we once

knew that they'd surely have never been even contemplated back in the

days of gigantic valve operated computers with less processing power than

your average pocket calculator and manually operated analogue telephone

exchanges rivalling the entire Norwegian coastline in their intricacy.

And whilst we are better connected, better equipped and better placed to

benefit from the technology of tomorrow, today, there will always be a price

to pay, and at what point will that price be widespread unemployment on

an unprecedented scale? There's not yet been a software program

developed that's computed the answer to this question, but one day

mankind will surely be faced with this very dilemma. Do we want to know

our destiny or are some things best left undetermined?