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Loading ...Thought on an impact of IT on economics
I would like to pose a theory that the “Internet” bubble was burst by sudden stop of tremendous flow of cash into myriad of projects 2000, not by sudden realization by “the Market” that there is no such thing as “Internet Economy”. Such realizations do not come suddenly.
Technology is often marketed by visionaries who have or display very strong “religious” believes necessary to gather momentum, critical mass of “converts” to make a dream the reality. Hence a term “evangelist” often used to describe job function of these people.
Peter Drucker wrote in his classic book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” that it often takes 15 years for a new technology to mature into commercially viable product, and provides a number of history examples. The IT industry is particularly susceptible to early claims of technology adoptions - perhaps you are old enough to remember promises of Artificial Intelligence and Paperless Office. Well, it seems that some of these promises are finally being delivered and not in a form of self serving advertising, but in a form of actually observed change in underlying business trends. The Economist reports that
demand for office paper began declining. David Pineault, a paper expert at InfoTrends, a consultancy, estimates that office workers in rich countries will reduce their consumption of “uncoated freesheet” paper (called “woodfree” in Europe)-the sort used in offices-every year for the foreseeable future. Some market segments, such as high-quality paper for photo printing, may buck the trend. But overall, Mr Pineault is “bearish” on paper.
“It’s a generational thing,” says Greg Gibson, in charge of North American office paper at International Paper (IP), the world’s largest paper-maker. Older people still prefer a hard copy of most things, but younger workers are increasingly comfortable reading on screens and storing and retrieving information on computers or online. As a result, IP has closed five uncoated-freesheet mills in America in the past decade, and the industry is consolidating. IP is investing instead in poor countries, where demand is still growing.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.
I love Peter Drucker, bless his soul, but I think his generalization was only appropriate for his time. New technologies are maturing faster than ever before and the technology-using public is more tolerant than ever of iterative design and production. The public now expects a whole new semiconductor platform to double in power or transistors every 18 months as dictated by Moore’s Law. If Intel’s evolving CPU platforms took as many years as Drucker states to mature - we’d still be in the computing dark ages.
Certainly, Web 2.0 is based on technology that has been evolving for decades now, but the methodologies and new technology practices that encourage and accommodate user generated content is much younger than 15 years.
I think the speed or pace of innovation and technology maturation will continue to increase. Cycles will shorten and we will not have 15 luxurious years to adapt and optimize.