The Information Revolution has unfolded in a way similar to the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th– and early 19th century. Our technology age is now at the same point the Industrial Revolution was in the early 1820s, 40 years after James Watt”™s improved steam engine was first applied to the spinning of cotton.
With the new “mental geography” created by the railroad, humanity mastered distance. In the mental geography of the Information Age, distance has been eliminated. Hudson Valley organizations know there is only one economy; it”™s global, without boundaries and fiercely competitive.
Moore”™s Law asserted that the price of the Information Revolution”™s basic element, the microchip would drop by 50 percent every 18 months. The same was true of the products whose manufacture was automated by the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution, in its first half-century, only mechanized the production of goods like cotton that had been in existence all along. It produced little that was new but made what had been expensive and handmade, cheap enough for mass consumption.
Since the first computers in the mid-1940s, the Technology Revolution, until about five years ago, had only “routinized” traditional processes already being done including payroll, inventory control, delivery schedules and all other routine processes of a business.
The processes themselves had not changed but were computerized with a tremendous increase in productivity requiring fewer people to do the same work. That is where the technology revolution had taken us.
The e-commerce we enjoy today is to the Information Revolution what the railroad was to the Industrial Revolution. Like the railroad 180 years ago, e-commerce has created a new and distinct boom, rapidly changing the economy, society and politics forever.
Not long ago, one company in the Midwest controlled 60 percent of the market in inexpensive dinnerware for restaurants, cafeterias and hospitals within a 100-mile radius of its factory. Because cheap china breaks easily, it was typically sold within a small area.
However, almost overnight, this company, which had been in business since the 1920s, lost more than half of its market. One of its customers found a European manufacturer on the Internet that offered china of better quality at a lower price, even when the cost of air shipping was considered. Within a few months, many major customers in the area had shifted to the European supplier.
One of the lessons is that everyone must become globally competitive, even if it manufactures or sells its services only within a local or regional market. In e-commerce, there are neither local companies nor distinct geographies. An organization”™s accounting can be done in India and a patient”™s MRI read by doctors in China. As they say at Disney, it”™s a small, small world.
Digitalization already has had a major impact on the newspaper, movie, music, medical, accounting and telephone sectors. The next phase will impact every industry in similar ways.
Businesses depend on the Internet for everything from inventory control to observing what customers are saying about products and services on Twitter and Facebook. How will you compete in the next phase of our Information Age where distance has been eliminated? How will you compete in a new world in which there is only one economy and only one global market?
Questions for discussion:
Ӣ What will intensified global competition do to your business and how can you position yourself in an economy where there will be no barriers to entry?
Ӣ How can you use technology to produce and deliver new products and services never thought of or available before?
Joe Murtagh is The DreamSpeaker, an international keynote speaker, meeting facilitator and business trainer. For questions or comments, Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com, www.TheDreamSpeaker.com or call (800) 239-0058.
