Change
Posted on 18. Sep, 2009 by jtheim
In 1965 Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, made the assertion that the computing power in the integrated circuit was growing exponentially, doubling every two years. The now famous “Moore’s Law” has held for more than 40 years.
Moore’s Law has been effective in illuminating the speed of change in technology. But, the way we do business hasn’t moved as fast. Technology, initially very task oriented, brought a wide range of point-solutions to make people more efficient. Then came the enterprise-class technologies of the 90s. These solutions where and still are about re-engineering business processes and workflows, and leveraging internal data to drive continuous improvement. Enterprise solutions have had an enormous impact on productivity – driving exponential gains across virtually all industries. However powerful, enterprise technologies primarily drive efficiency into existing, intra-organizational business processes.
Enter the connected economy. New web-centric technologies are driving organizational and social change at a dizzying pace. Application development has skyrocketed since the early 2000s. Extra-organizational integration and automation are increasing everyday and many aspects of business are being outsourced to other companies with niche specializations. These technologies are bringing about the biggest transformation in the way business gets done ever seen – and this change is accelerating every day.
Today you might have a very small company in Luxemburg develop a simple web app, that disrupts an entire industry. This small company (Skype) sold to eBay for more than the entire GDP of Luxemburg. On the consumer side, high profile companies like Amazon, eBay, Skype, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have certainly made an impact on the way we conduct our lives. But, much less heralded, are the thousands and thousands of technology companies developing specific technology solutions – from development tools to complete web applications – that are disrupting the way business gets done.
If you’re a layperson, you may not recognize the enormity of what is happening right now in both large and small development environments around the world. But, the web applications they are developing today will make business work differently tomorrow. Companies today must be equipped to deal with, even embrace this change – because , over the next decade, we will likely see more disruptive change than our predecessors faced in a century. Are you ready?
