Large technological changes in the business

By Leonardo Bergamo (Brazil)

1980 ... Communication between companies and individuals is based on letters, fax, telex or landlines. Payment by credit cards is done mechanically, as well as data entry of timecards. Check-in at airports is made with a card filled in a typewriter. The libraries are entirely of printed books and the management of them is fully manual. The knowledge is concentrated in the research and development centers and access to them is restricted or expensive. The world economy is basically made between countries and multinationals have just an innocent way to integrate processes between their subsidiaries. The transaction data among the few people who had a personal computer is made available on diskettes containing from 250KB to 1.44MB and the few companies that have computers use hard disks up to 10MB or communication links at speeds up to 100 Kb / s. The term IT does not yet exist and the systems within companies only help in process automation and data processing, most often charged by typing. 

Now we are in 2010, only 30 years later, coming across a great revolution, breaking cultural, social, economic, industrial, scientific, and why not say too mental paradigms for our entire society. This revolution is compared to what happened when we began writing and start to broadly use electricity, radio and television. With the appearance of these elements, communication and the mode of interaction between individuals and among the numerous social groups changed radically, exactly what we are experiencing today. The Internet is changing definitely the life of the entire planet, the watchwords now are available, integration, speed and easy access to as much as possible information. 

Within this concept of multi-revolution, the world economy also benefits from the immense amount of information available, the huge interactivity between customers, suppliers and government and definitely globalized production and commerce processes. Nowadays no company incorporated in the "new world economy" can dispenses a minimal computer connected to the internet. For what? Communicate, interact, assess and understand all aspects that can somehow influence the outcome of your business. Information Technology left the role of merely "optimizer" of processes to the competitive differentiator and value-generating businesses. It is in this context that we living that Internet must be part of our learning, routine, plans and way of thinking and act.