Technology: The Past, The Present, And The Future
The year is 1993 and the world we are familiar with hasn’t been touched by technology. A magazine, for instance, was a tool for entertainment to get the latest news on your favourite celebs, but also a tool you could use to swat flies with. Email was rare and the few selected who had mobiles, could only use them to make calls. In 1997 the mass adoption of the internet was real, and when Google launched in 1998 the internet also entered most homes. The digital revolution was a reality in 2003, a prediction that was not believed to occur for many years later, and it only took 10 years. The digital revolution meant that everyone was getting emails on the phones, pictures taken on phones, music was being downloaded – let’s say we fully migrated to “bits”!The world today is digital. We are in a digital era with digitisation and digitalization. Digitisation is not something new. The concept already started 1993 without us having a name for it, or even knowing that is was happening. We were clueless about the impact it would have.
Digitisation refers to the process of converting information from a physical format to a digital one. Think email instead of documents posted in the mail or sent through a fax machine. Think PDF’s in a folder on your laptop instead of printed files in a folder on your desk. This digital revolution has laid the foundation for improving business processes – simplifying, improving and renewing. This is digitalization. Digitalization done properly is changing businesses and industries all around the world. It’s the foundation of disruption. It’s about automation of processes, making quicker and better decisions. The overflow of information available, the increase in data collected and a picky, demanding population is putting a pressure on companies to create better services. What data, which information and how should we use it? Wired so correctly printed; “In the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context. ” Our mobile devices have more computing power than the machines that helped send a man on the moon. With mobile devices being connected to the internet and giving us access to the world. If we collect the right information and data, we can know what’s going to happen, what you want before you know yourself and answer questions we didn’t even know to ask. That makes us at least heroes. Having services that help us predict and react accordingly. 25 years have gone since 1993. 25 years of amazing development of technology. Over ninety per cent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone, and the speed is increasing.
In 25 years, 2043, we will be using technology that doesn’t exist today. Development will be done at a speed we can’t imagine today. Forefront leaders like IBM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft together with over 100 million startups each year are researching and developing new exciting tech. We need to make every employee, consumer or inhabitant into a knowledge worker – the best version of ourselves. In this digital era, we live digital, we work digital. We need to develop services in order to put the super next to hero. And let me tell you – I can’t wait to be super!
