Organizational Evolution Resulting from Technological Advancement

The individual attribute of the mind is mirrored by the computational capability of
society. Surveying history, we see numerous developments in the understanding and
implementation of mathematics. From numbers to represent counting, to geometry
to track heavenly bodies, to the abacus, the electronic calculator, and the computer,
mankind has made progress in leveraging mental capabilities to pursue human
endeavors. In very recent history, the electronic computer has become a lever for
the mind in the same way that harnessing steam power, internal combustion, and
electricity became levers for the physical body.

The ramifications of mental leverage
far surpasses the implications of physical leverage.
While physical leverage helps us subdue our environment, thus freeing up time
for other pursuits, mental leverage provides us the ability to work together in new
ways. Mental leverage enables us to discover new horizons never before possible
(consider advances in recombinant DNA research, particle physics, and astrophysics).
We can now create machines and processes that actually are used to create the
next, more advanced generation of machines and processes.

Technology has become the partner of imagination to reshape the world.
Richard Sennett, in his book The Culture of the New Capitalism,
states the implications of this advance in technology
capability directly: “By the 1990s, thanks to microprocessing advances in electronics,
the old dream/nightmare of automation began to become a reality in both manual
and bureaucratic labor: at last it would be cheaper to invest in machines than to pay
people to work.”

In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil projects the computational
capabilities that might be expected if electronic developments continue to
advance at a rate comparable to the last 40 years.

He anticipates that a $1000 personal computer in the year 2020 will have enough memory and computational capability to store and take action on all the life experiences of a single individual
(sights, sounds, thoughts, etc.). He further projects that, if current trends continue,
that a $1000 personal computer offered in the year 2040 will be able to store and
take action on all the life experience of all people living on Earth at that time! Even
if Kurzweil is wrong in his exact timing or magnitude, the trends are evident, and
the implications are staggering. In some ways, they are already coming to pass
through the power of one system (the Internet) to access all systems.

The individual attribute that Danforth calls the social side corresponds to communication
from the technology perspective of the organization. Communications provide
the foundation of interaction that sustains cooperation in an organization.
Organizational communication has evolved in many ways as technology has brought
about change through new possibilities. Through the ages, most enterprises were
small because they required personal interaction to sustain focus and provide direction.
This began to change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as technology
provided new ways to communicate: newspaper, telegraph, telephone, radio, and others. Now organizations had methods to communicate across distances without
great time delay, and new organizational principles could be enacted.
Technology continued to advance, now at greater rates because larger numbers
of people could collaborate in its progress.
Organizations could now expand their
boundaries, no longer bound to word-of-mouth communications in a single location.
In the early days of my career, common management practice was to place project
teams in close physical proximity to maximize the interchange of ideas and
strengthen cooperation. This was true when the most efficient form of communication
was direct conversation: a stop by the office or a face-to-face meeting. With the
advent of e-mail, voice over the Internet, teleconferencing, and video teleconferencing,
the cost of communicating and monitoring remote operations has so diminished
as to revamp management practices. With no financial communications barrier to
outsourcing efforts, organizations are tending to globalize their operations at an
increasing rate, seeking cost-effective labor wherever they find it. Survival of the
fittest organization, in a competitive world, compels organizations to find the best
match between quality and cost to meet their production and labor needs. Cheap
and instantaneous communications have eliminated the global barriers to entry for
mental labor and for many forms of manufacturing labor.