HOW TECHNOLOGY

HAS CHANGED THE

FACE OF BUSINESS
FOR TODAY AND FOR
THE FUTURE.
By Jeffery Nevil
Feb 2015

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 wed 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?

1|P age

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 Londons 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
Lloyds Building, which is one of Londons most iconic office complexes.
By the time of East India Houses 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.

2|P age

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.

3|P age

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.

4|P age

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.

5|P age

HOW FAR WEVE 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.

6|P age

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 cant 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 thats all but forgotten.

7|P age

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
theres no reason one man with
a vision cant go head to head
with a globally dominant super
brand.

8|P age

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

9|P age

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.

10 | P a g e

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?

11 | P a g e