On re-reading through the previous post, I realize that it sounds as though I’m a Luddite who has no appreciation of what Information technology has done for the world. Maybe the PC was acting up at the time or some website I wanted to access was slow, so perhaps I was in a bad mood. Anyway, I wanted to set the record straight.
In reality, I’m amazed at how far things have come in just a few short years, especially relating to the Internet, which is where I interact the most with IT these days.
In my management consulting days I spent a lot of time trying to help large companies to get any discernible benefits from IT: frequently they had spent millions of dollars (or pounds or euros, whatever) and had bought the latest “fad” system because the management team was sold on the idea by intellectual arguments and marketing hype. But in practice, they hadn’t a clue how to use what they bought. For example, one of the big new things in the 1990s was SAP software, which cost millions to buy and even more millions to install. It was a very clever piece of software, revolutionary in many ways and with fantastic potential. But after several years of this thing being at the top of the software hit parade, independent reports put the “success” rate of SAP installations at about 20%. In other words, 80% of SAP installations failed to deliver what they had promised. No wonder IT gets a bad name!
On the other hand, contrast that with the way the Internet has pervaded everyone’s life and become reliable and indispensable. When I first came over to the USA from the UK in the late nineties, I had a laptop computer, an e-mail account and a dial up connection. It all worked ok, but slowly of course by today’s standards. I could send and receive messages back to the UK parent company, stay in contact with colleagues and my family and get online news about UK developments. I could even download music and video clips, sometimes illegally if Napster or Limewire were used (but of course, I didn’t do that!). However, the dial-up connection required legendary amounts of patience for that.
Ten years on and it’s like a whole different universe, mainly due to the advent of broadband but also the advance of website technology and infrastructure. I can do everything I did before but now I can do virtually everything else online too: I can buy products online, run an online business, earn money online and keep up with Hollywood without leaving home because of the facility to watch movies online.
But for my wife and I, probably the best feature is the ability to have video calls with our UK family just to keep in touch. We have just one grandchild who is now three years old, so he’s at the stage where he’s interested in everything and prepared to carry on a conversation and role-play. Because his parents are very tech-savvy, he’s grown up in a world that has every hi-tech device imaginable. Cell phones are perfectly normal to him (and he has his own toy one), computers are fascinating and the idea of talking to his grandparents who are in the USA is simply commonplace. So despite the dangers of webcams (!!!), we make full use of what’s available.
We have a video call with him and his parents roughly once a week and so we’re able to see how rapidly he’s growing up. He is more than happy to play transatlantic games with cars, stuffed toys, books, in fact anything. And I’m sure that my wife and I get even more from it than he does. Without the technology we would be faced with long gaps in between seeing him (an ordinary phone is fine, but it doesn’t capture the imagination of a three year old like a picture does). His parents are also delighted that he can keep in touch with his grandparents: our daughter had a very close relationship with her grandparents so she appreciates what rewards it can bring to a child.
So regardless of the overall balance of cost versus benefit (see previous post!), everyone in our family is a confirmed technology fan.