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Toward New Horizons - Information Technology
2007-11-04
In their 1995 work, Creating A New Civilization, Alvin and Heidi Toffler argue that the symbolic electronic economy is essentially different from the Industrial economy of the 19th and 20th centuries. They identify a significant shift towards mental-sector jobs. Even in traditional employment, workers are “mind workers” interpreting information. use computers to calculate grain feed mixtures, fertilizer blends, and chemical inputs; assembly line workers monitor consoles and video screens to manage robotic welders or assemblers and production flow; investment switch on their laptops as they model financial markets. The person whose work is manipulating symbols rather than moving physical things is a growing percentage of the population. In essence, the Tofflers argue, knowledge workers are replacing manual workers.
Information technologies, telecommunications, or communications technologies are terms that are often used interchangeably. These technologies provide the means to transmit text, voice and video data to anyplace in the world in real time. They also allow for easy storage of data and provide the ability for retrieval of the data at any time. For purposes of this report, we will use the term information technologies to apply to all of the above.
Significant changes in how we live our lives, run our businesses, and produce the foods and goods we use and consume is not new. Bursts of innovation, which happen about every 55 years, produce change. A burst of innovation in the 1880-1910 period gave us the automobile, the airplane, incandescent lights, wireless telegraphy, roll film, motion pictures, and radio. In the 1930s, a burst of innovation gave us synthetic fibers, home appliances, jet airplanes and television. Though bursts of innovation produce change, revolutions change everything. The first revolution was the Agricultural revolution, followed by the Printing and then the Industrial revolutions, and now the Digital revolution. The three components of this new Digital Age are computers (which let us store data and information in digital form), software (which makes individual computers powerful and flexible), and communications networks (which magnify the power of individual computers).
There is no doubt that “Computers are the core technology of our times. They are the new paradigm, the new “common sense.” In the comparatively short space of forty years, computers have become central to the operations of industrial societies. Without computers and computer networks, “much of manufacturing industry, commerce, transport and distribution, government, the military, health services, education, and research would simply grind to a halt.”
We must remember though, “The computer, by virtue of its programmability, is not a machine like a printing press or a player piano—devices which are configured to perform a specific function. … [A computer] acquires its function only when someone programs it. Before that time it is an abstract machine, one that can do “anything.” (It can even be made to print a newspaper or play a tune.) To many people accustomed to the machines of the Industrial Revolution, a machine having such general capabilities seemed absurd, like a toaster that could sew buttons on a shirt. But the computer was just such a device; it could do many things its designers never anticipated.”
However, it is the last component of the Digital Age that is perhaps most profoundly changing how we think, work and produce. In essence we have entered the Connectivity Era, in which the “emphasis is on services, with the appeal to clients, not customers,” and businesses need “to develop mutual learning arrangements with our clients.” In other words, the future of business, learning and consuming will be driven by our ability to interconnect with the elements of each stream of motion for a product or service. This is so whether it is supply chain or logistics management for a business; the need for businesses to know exactly where in a production stream a product is both for their own management of flow and for better service to customers; online procurement by businesses; purchasing by consumers; or the desire by consumers to have complete traceability or history of any food product they purchase. It is connectivity of the flow or life of the good that is the driver.
The transformation brought about by information technologies has created “a new approach to organizational behavior, one in which relationships are more intricate, collaborative, and bound by the mutual responsibilities of colleagues. As the new technology integrates information across time and space, managers and workers each overcome their narrow functional perspectives and create new roles that are better suited to enhancing value adding activities in a data-rich environment.”
