There was a very interesting article in today's (June 11) Wall Street Journal by Brian Wesbury from First Trust Portfolios on the impact of technology on business and organization productivity. Here's the LINK (although I think the WSJ often shuts down their content after a day or two).
Wesbury's point is that we are in the middle of a business revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since the industrial revolution:
"Rather than watching the sun set on the U.S., as many believed would happen in the early 1980s, the U.S. has experienced one of the greatest booms in wealth creation in world history. And the impact of our technological innovation has helped lift untold numbers out of poverty. This technology has created massive amounts of change. Like the Industrial Revolution before it, the current transformation is anything but pain-free. It's what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. Google, Craigslist and Microsoft have been prospering. General Motors, United Airlines and the New York Times have not."
As I think about the part that revolutions in our industry (document and content technologies) have played in the overall productivity revolution, I can't help but think that we (read AIIM, ECM industry, individual companies) have not done a good enough job of documenting the productivity impact of our technologies. Sure, there are lots of case studies out there, but if you want to understand more than the impact of one particular company's solution in one particular customer (and written by the company, to boot), there is a woeful lack of information.
Creating a more systematic framework to understand what end users are doing and how they are doing it in an industry specific and process specific context is a tall order. But I think this is the area where we (read AIIM, ECM industry, individual companies) need to spend some resources.
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