“Age of Accelerations”

I recently read Tom Friedman’s book “Thank You for Being Late”. One of the key takeaways is that we live in the “age of accelerations” due to the technology industry. Wireless networks and phones enable us to capture information easily and transfer it onto the Internet, which is then distributed by social networks and search engines for consumption in near real time. Information is flowing at a high velocity compared to earlier ages.

We are living in this new age when it comes to exchanging personal and, dare we say, more “fun” information, but the business world seems to be operating at a much slower pace set in the era of personal computers.

There are several problems with the current flow of information at work.

Firstly, the tools we currently use, such as the Office Suite or Google Docs, still live in a PC era. For the average user, these applications are mostly one-dimensional, used to simply to take raw text, voice, or images, but they don’t transform that information.

Secondly, the information captured is subject to the interpretations by the person capturing the information. When a photo is taken and shared on social media platforms, though filters may be added, essentially the integrity of the image is not compromised. Working with a written file immediately has this flaw because the end product can only be created by someone actively trying to create it.

Thirdly, systems currently in place in the workspace require users to manually organize information and/or enter into a workflow, which is a dated process and doesn’t live up to the “age of accelerations”.  Our expectations have changed with products like Google that automatically organize the Internet and Facebook that get all the information from our friends and media in a jiffy!

In this new age, shouldn’t we be able to capture, organize, share and recall information as quickly and as effortlessly as we are used to with search engines and social networks? And Artificial Intelligence and voice should enable us to take actions and follow thru to get things done at an accelerated pace to compete in the “age of accelerations”.