We are living in a world that is more connected than it has ever been before. We are able to talk to our parents on the other side of the world, send a video to our friend in the middle of the night, or meet with business partners in another country. All this was once only available to the most affluent, or the most obsessed, but over the past decade technology has grabbed our attention and today you would be hard-pressed to find somebody without a smartphone in their pocket.
The world is at our fingertips, but all of this would be impossible without the internet, which is arguably one of the most influential advances in technology since the printing press.
The internet has expanded our horizons, both in and out of the business world, on one hand we can stay in touch with relatives overseas and on the other we can not only work in collaboration with other businesses, we are able to operate entire ventures over the internet.
Business as a whole is becoming as much a social enterprise as it is a professional one and thanks to technologies like Wi-Fi and ‘the cloud’, we are able to share our work from anywhere there is an internet connection. Workers have been living healthier, happier lives working from home or in a cafe rather than at an office, and in no way has productivity been affected.
It can be argued that Ecommerce has become as important as ‘traditional’ business operations, and to support this claim we would like to point out that for the first time, online book sales have surpassed brick-and-mortar sales.
Technology has shaped the way we do everything and we are witnessing its affect everywhere, from the way we find information to the language we use; Google has become a name synonymous with search engines, and the phrase “Google it” has become so engrained in our collective consciousness that if Google were to collapse tomorrow, we would probably still be using it. It’s funny I should mention Google (not really) because they are famous for being one of the best places to work due to the attitude that they have adopted towards the way we work, and many of the businesses operating in the silicon valley have adopted similar attitudes. Interesting how the IT industry itself is changing the way we view work.
Over the last few decades, the role of technology has evolved as much as the technology itself – a correlation that is by no means incidental. Suddenly all of those old computers went from number-crunchers and word-processors to one of the most important tools that every single one of us use. Technology -especially the internet, as this is where the foundations lie- has shaped the way we conduct business and to many new businesses (like CTC from the Outsourcing blog), utilising the internet as part of your business model is an essential part of being successful in today’s world.
