How Business Has Evolved Over Time

For better or worse, the world has become a connected place - but in the business industry especially. If you consider your workplace and how much you daily lean on technology in small ways, try and imagine your day without it.

Even ten years ago, things were less streamlined than they are now, and even lesser twenty years ago. It seems as though there is an automated process for everything, or some new application online that makes paperwork a snap.

The world has more than one mind to thank, for making code and programming a possibility, and ever since home computers were available in the 1980s there have been huge advances in writing programs to expedite processes. What started as a black screen and green text that would simply give you the date, has exploded into apps for everything.

Programming languages themselves have evolved as well; rather than writing programs as a block of text, or the “monolithic model,” developers are breaking codes into smaller, more manageable pieces called microservices.

It sounds complex, but the idea is, a big program broken up into smaller “mini-programs” which talk to each other and make the process easier. If this sounds confusing, one microservices example that you might know is Amazon, which has developed its own architecture over time as the website has grown.

Most people of today grew up in an era when printing everything was par for the course, but there is a culture shift in the business world: going paperless. Rather than printing meeting agendas, supervisors are emailing them to employees. Thanks to technology, there are so many digital ways to share items that relied on paper.

Some of these include:

• Calendars: With apps like Google calendar and Appointment Plus available to you, when was the last time you physically wrote something down on a wall calendar?
• Presentations: Slideshow apps like Powerpoint take away the stress of creating an over-the-top physical display the next time you need to make a presentation to your team.

• E-Signatures: Signatures are required for many instances, if you’re doing business with someone across the world, uploading contracts and documents to a secure third-party like DocuSign to eliminate the middleman.
• Marketing: Paper marketing is still very much alive, but the first thing clients will likely ask you is “do you have a website?”

There are some obnoxious things at work that simply take too long, which is why technology saves the day once more. Rather than wasting time filling out paperwork, software helps to autofill forms and allows for drag-and-drop systems to easily add attachments.

Being able to focus on doing your job instead of worrying about the smaller aspects of the workplace is important. Technology is used for more than challenging your friends to a dance-off on Tik-Tok, it helps the world spin a little more easily.