We are living in an era when technology is becoming more and more abundant and more and more necessary to function. This applies as an individual and as a business. The focus of this rant is technology used in business.
It used to be that high technology tools were optional and could give you a real edge in the marketplace. I suppose that’s still true, but now it seems like most technologies are mandatory and if you don’t have them you won’t survive. To make sense of this, try to imagine a thriving business today that doesn’t have the ability to send all its workers home to work remotely when the next lockdown occurs. I can’t!
The promise of technology is that it gives us time. It saves us money. It makes us more productive. It creates freedom. In the last five to ten years, however, what I’ve seen is that we are drowning in all our technologies, dying a slow death by all of our digital platforms. What is happening? And am I the only one noticing?
First, the competitive advantage is only temporary. Once a technology becomes mainstream, you no longer have an edge by using it. If everyone’s using it, you must also now use it just to keep up with your customers’ newly increased expectations. The obvious example would be email. Early email adopters in the 90s and early 00s had a competitive advantage by saving time and money communicating with their prospects and customers without having to print and mail nearly as many physical letters. Today, you obviously must use email at a very minimum. If you don’t have an email address, you can’t even be in business. Right now, everyone is starting to use ChatGPT and which seems to answer all your questions, write your blogs, outline your meetings, and more. Those on the cutting edge are using it. Pretty soon, it will be a mandatory tool and you will be fall behind if you don’t have it. This is a tech race that never ends.
Second, your productivity expectation increases with every new technological innovation. You thought your technology was saving you time and giving you freedom, but once your technology became mainstream, you’re expected to produce more. Sure, in the beginning, you knocked off hours of work every week by emailing documents to your clients instead of printing and mailing them. But now that your competitors figured out how to email things too, they are once again a threat to your existence. So you either have to you have to fill those hours you saved by doing more. You must produce more, add more value, fight off the competitors that now also have the same technology prowess as you, prospect more, market more, and spend time doing R&D for the next new technology to reduce time spent in some other area of your business. The time you have saved is now spent doing more work.
Third, every platform, program, system, and app that you have gets more and more features, becomes more and more complicated, and results in more and more time you and your team must spend learning how to be a proficient user. If you don’t have at least one person in your organization that has a special nerd interest of being really into technology, you will either have to pay a lot of money to have someone help you, or you will have to spend a lot of time Googling, watching 10-minute FAQ videos, emailing tech support, and/or waiting on hold. Your team’s new focus has now shifted away from building expertise in the product or service you provide to your customers, to building expertise in your technology to help deliver your product or service in a faster more commoditized fashion.
Fourth, these mandatory platforms that you have are all becoming increasingly connected to each other so when you make a mistake in one, you make a mistake in all. It’s partially our fault: we businessowners fought for integration so we wouldn’t have to log into four different systems and enter our clients’ data four different times. But the unintended consequences are real. There is no room for error. If someone on your team misspells a name or transposes a digit in a phone number or email address, you’ve got a lot of undoing to do (and perhaps a liability issue if you failed to send someone an important document due to the typo). When every system depends on the other, if one of the platforms is down or has an error, the entire system is broken. And someone doesn’t get the memo, the paycheck, the certificate, the ID card, the birthday card.
Fifth, external devices are neglected and no one knows how to work on them. I think that every tech worker that used to dedicate their minds to printers, copiers, and scanners has migrated over to social media sites, apps, websites, CRMs, etc. I can’t say I blame them. Who wants to work on grey plastic boxes and deal with dinosaurs complaining about paper jams when you could be working on something exciting that runs no risk of getting toner all over your pants. Yes, I know that printers and scanners are are on their way out, but we still need them occasionally, and when we do, we need them to work.
Last, thanks to all the hackers, thugs, and other dishonest people out there, we are experiencing a slow death by password changes, virus scanning, perfectly good emails getting sent to spam folders, and cumbersome multi-factor authentication. Being able to do something quick is replaced by wading through a river of security barriers to entry. Passwords alone; the rules for creating passwords are getting out of control. At least four special characters, no sequences of numbers, a few Caps, and it may not be a repeat of any of your last 17 passwords. The only solution is this is what? More technology – password management software.
I could probably add to this list, but the point is that this rapid technology proliferation is making everything annoying. It’s also creating a world where there is no such thing as an entry level employee. There is no such thing as hiring someone quickly and putting them in the field. They have to go through extensive training with all the technology platforms. This isn’t just a problem for the boomers and the older generations. The younger generation Y or Z, or whatever they are: they don’t have any intuition about this stuff either. They’re pretty much only good at using their phones.
Again, I’m a big user of technology. I use it and embrace it mostly because I have to, especially in the business world that I’m apart of. I don’t hate all of it and I’m not foolish enough to put it in an “all bad” or “all good” binary. But I am questioning whether it’s hitting a point where it’s primarily creating more bad than good. And not just business: are we really happier as a result of technology? Do we have more of zest for life, a spirit of adventure, and sense of optimism than our ancestors had in generations past? I would suggest not. In fact, I think we as a species are more prone to fear, anxiety, and depression than ever before. We’re experiencing a slow death by technology.
Tags: technology
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