February 22nd, 2014
In 2007 Karl Fisch, a teacher and IT Director of a middle and high school gathered various research data and made a presentation that puts the world we live in today in perspective. The presentation was titled “Did You Know”, with the goal for audiences to pause and think about the speed of change around us, and more importantly creates the catalyst for audiences to think the question – what does all this change mean? Some of the interesting findings were:
Being in the IT industry for the last 16 years that simply deals with information technology advancements on a year by year basis, this presentation was a wakeup call for me to stop and ponder what do all these changes mean to me as an individual, to my children as the next generation, and to the organizations I serve in? What I will share today is my response to the questions, “What does this mean to Kan?”.
Individually, the speed of technological change is not foreign to me having chosen the IT field as a career. Being educated in the discipline and living and breathing through the most rapid changes in the industry over the last decade and a half, I’ve concluded this means I’ve chosen a field of profession where t the prerequisite is life-time learning and continuous updating of skill sets just to hold a job. With technologies advancing at an annual basis around us, the ability to learn, master, and adapt quickly became a key competitive skill in the industry. Personally, I think this is likely true for other professions that leverage the use of information technology as a mean to achieve business goals and objectives.
For my kids, I believe this means they will grow up in an environment unlike ours today where anyone in non-IT professions but with the ability to understand and ‘speak’ IT fluently stands out as a unique and a major contributor to the organization. My kids will enter into the society where, at the time they start their career, being unable to understand, speak, comprehend, and adopt new technologies constantly for any field of work becomes a deficiency that likely will hinder their ability to hold a job.
To the organizations I serve in, I believe this means adoption of IT for efficiency and productivity is no longer an option but a necessity. More importantly, to organizations that adopt information technologies as a mean to achieve business goals and objectives, this means once the organization is on the path of leveraging IT, the decisions of how and when to invest in updates, upgrades, integration, and/or migrations due to industry and vendors’ ability to sustain in the competitive landscape of IT is less of a choice by the organization. Organizations are likely forced to operate in these externally driven forces of rapid and constant cycles of change to maintain their efficiency.
With my interpretation of what these findings mean, I’ve also concluded that although constant and rapid changes in the way we operate with the tools we use at a personal and/or professional level is psychologically demanding, the reality is constant change is the new norm in the society we live in today. We live in such a connected world that changes are more likely imposed upon us from external entities and forces that we have very little ability to influence and/or to choose not to change. In the end, I believe what is still within our control is our ability to modify our state of mind in how we can ‘learn’ to accept constant ‘change’ so to make our lives less stressful.
So what do these findings mean to you?