Techno-Business: Smarter, Better, Faster and Cheaper

Techno-Business: Smarter, Better, Faster and Cheaper

One need not look far to see the revolution of technology in businesses of all types. We interact with these advances everyday. When we shop for food, buy gas, go to the Doctor, start our cars, almost every facet of our lives have been touched by technology. This revolution started around the time of the industrial revolution and has grew steadily through the 1900’s. In the 40’s and 50’s scientific discoveries began to filter into business and then on to the consumer.

When I was a kid I traveled into New York City where my father’s office was located on Lexington Avenue. It was about 1970 or so and I was fascinated by the technology of that day and age. He was the vice president of sales for a large international heavy equipment manufacturer. In his 30th floor office there was a ticker-tape machine, teletype machines, electric typewriters and a Xerox copier. I was fascinated. Five years later when we moved to Charlotte, where he joined the Jones Family in running J.A. Jones Construction Company. It was one of the largest General Contractors in the world. Most Departments had a large computer console in them. On the fourth floor was a 7000 square foot computer room. It had giant computers utilizing reels of tape. It also had plotters to produce CAD/ CAM drawings. All of this made a profound impression on me.

It is hard to measure everything that has happened since then. I have been in the workplace for most of it. Businesses hardly resemble their fore runners. It has not been without it’s consequences, both positive and negative. Profits, productivity

and material efficiency have sky rocketed. Along with those gains their have been many jobs lost to technology, particularly in manufacturing. Also much of management is now done through technology and not face to face human to human. As F.W. Taylor laments in his classic text on the American Industrial Revolution, “Now, one of the first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type . . . He is so stupid that the word 'percentage' has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.”

Many have been thought of as just a wheel in a machine in their jobs. Now many feel like they just feed the machine data all day and wait to see what the machine tells them to do.

We have gone from huge, room size number crunchers in the 1950’s that could not even compete with the computing power of the latest cell phones, to mainframes, personal computers, to laptops, and