New technologies – New challenges – New Opportunities
Within modern enterprises, these times are very interesting. New technologies are approaching the business landscape day by day. Our daily business is mainly support by IT tools. Information and communication technologies support communication, cooperation and workflows within different departments, which do not necessarily have to be in the same location today. It directly influences the way employees cooperate. Home offices, something that was rather unconventional in the past, are normal in today’s world. New tools allow employees to work from everywhere but stay connected to their teams all over the world. In a globalised world it is a key factor for success to have experts everywhere, not only in your head office.
From the first days of home computing in the early eighties, using the Commodore C64 or the Apple II to our today’s world using tablets and smartphones with data connections directly into the data cloud it seems that ages have passed by. But in fact only 30 years lie between the first introduction of the Commodore C64 and today. The Commodore C64 was the best selling single personal computer of all time, with a 1.023 MHz CPU and a memory of 64kB RAM. Please compare that to your today’s computer system or just to your smartphone.
These fast moving changes affect enterprises in all kind of fields. They cannot just concentrate on their products and services anymore. Their technologic equipment becomes an active enabler and even as crucial to their success then their core business. Therefore, also in the field of technology they have to improve continuously to stay ahead of competition.
Thanks to the internet we were able to invent many different technologies like Skype, Twitter, Facebook to make the world a real “global village”, just as predicted by McLuhan in 1962. Let us take the example of Skype, it is used in classrooms to help the students getting in touch with partner schools all over the world or simply chat with the author of a discussed book or article. In 2011, before the takeover of Microsoft, Skype listed roughly 124 million people as “connected”. That directly influenced how people can stay in touch with each other.
Information, consumer ideas and interests can be followed by enterprises very closely. But also the enterprise itself became more and more vitreous. Unfortunately, many enterprises forget that. If they start to spam their followers, poorly manage negative feedback or publish the wrong content it makes it difficult for them to get back on track. Consumers also like to compare the web appearance between competitors and they expect the same convenience everywhere. If one company provides a good web shop, it is normal for the consumer to expect the same quality everywhere. The same applies for online appointment bookings or anything else. Enterprises need to listen very closely to the market otherwise they appear exactly like they do not want to.
The idea of a global village is not so far away. In fact we already live this life. Communication and information exchange are so easy and normal, that globalisation rose during the decades of technological evolution. We brought our world closer together, in political, culture and economical aspects. We had never been so close to revolutions like in Egypt before, we were never able to exchange with people all over the world within seconds and we never had so wide competition from all over the world. Global markets are not longer just open to big enterprises with an enormous financial power. Even small or medium ones can afford modern technologies to challenge big players within their local and international markets. The power structures change.
Therefore times getting really interesting, especially if you call yourself a modern enterprise. Maybe if you carve string puppets in your basement you would not consider your business as a modern enterprise?! But who knows? With some good social media approaches even such a business can benefit from these changes we all go through.
References and further reading
Brown, S., Blackmon, K., Cousins, P., Maylor, H. (2001): Operations Management – Policy, practice and performance improvement, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann
Gans, K. (2011): Should you change your thinking about Change Management?, in Strategic Finance, vol. 93, issue 4, p. 48 – 50
Himanen, P., Torvalds, L., Castells, M. (2001): The hacker ethic and the sprit oft he new economy, New York: Random House Inc
McLuhan, M. (1962): The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Porter, M. (1985): Competitive advantage – Creating and sustaining superior performance, New York: Free Press
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