FOCUS FEATURE
THE DIGITAL AGE
Bretton Jones is a digital business adviser with over 30 years’ experience in digital technology as a consultant and practitioner, working for IBM, Microsoft and Vodafone among others. In this guest piece for Business Network, he looks at the birth of a digital age that continues to grow at an astounding pace and assesses how businesses can take advantage.
We have always looked to innovation to improve our lives. From the discovery of fire to mobile computing, mankind has used ingenuity to find ways of doing things better, faster, easier and more productively. We have manipulated our environment to survive, adapt and thrives and we’ve used tools to do this. Every new development or tool has driven more change
and brought both opportunities and challenges. Flints made fire portable which allowed us to expand into new, previously uninhabitable territories. Farming tools made food more easily accessible but tied us to specific areas. This in turn led to trade and new tools for keeping track of what we had, trading for what we didn’t and making a profit on the difference. The stone tablet became papyrus and chisels became pens, keyboards and voice recognition. The abacus became Babbage’s Difference Engine and on to Turing’s modern computer. Messengers became telegraphs, telephones, television, texts and touchscreens. Societies that failed to adapt either vanished or were vanquished. Those that adapted expanded and thrived. There have been many ages of change, from the Stone
Age to the Industrial Revolution and now the Digital Age. So, what is the Digital Age? The name comes from the digital binary basis of modern computing – 0s and 1s - and it has brought technological change at an unprecedented rate. Digital technology now covers every aspect of human society and industry. The move from analogue media (pen and paper) and manual tasks to digital media (electronically-generated and stored) and automated tasks has impacted us all and business processes in particular. One good example of this is accounting. Luca Pacioli’s treatise on double entry book-keeping – Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Porportioni et Proportionalita (Review of Arithmetic, Geometry, Ratio and Proportion), was one of the first items to be published on the Guttenberg printing press in 1494, itself a crucial precursor to digital media. The development of VisiCalc in 1978 moved accountants
away from manually-calculated double entry spreadsheets to electronically-created and stored versions with automatically updated cells. This eliminated the need for calculators, paper ledgers and pencils and both lowered the margin for error - and made errors easier to spot - and increased speed and productivity. This in turn led to an initial profusion of accounting packages and the subsequent growth of software ‘platforms’ such as SAP,
42 business network December 2017/January 2018
Papyrus has given way to laptops, phones and tablets
Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics that dominate medium sized and larger business enterprises. This move to software platforms is an indicator of how
digital technology has allowed business process integration through data interfaces and automation. Stand-alone accounting software has become increasingly rare in medium to large organisations as the functionality has been absorbed into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. ERP manages tangible and intangible assets such as materials, human resources and financial resources. There is a clear overlap with the transactional-based activity managed by accounting software such as billing and payment, sales, purchase and payroll. Software providers have used this overlap to create new products that integrate assets and transactions. This integration can then be extended into related areas such as supply chain and distribution, project management, analysis and planning and sales, marketing and customer relations. In effect, digital technology has allowed organisations to link previously separate business functions to create a more productive end-to-end system and, in the process, have found a source of management information to better manage their businesses. Another significant change driven by the growth of
digital technology is the massive increase in software, hardware and service products and providers. Marketing was a relatively late embracer of digital technology but is now one that has shown the largest growth. Scott Brinker, digital marketing guru and CEO of Chiefmartech, has suggested that the number of suppliers has grow from 150 in 2011 to 3,874 in 2016. If this growth continues, he predicts there will be over one million providers by 2027.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
