When I began my career almost 25 years ago, I could not have imagined how the world of today would look. I remember schlepping to the computer lab on my university campus on cold Chicago nights to check my email and type out papers using Microsoft on the desktop computers or use the common printer. I got my first email address in college and the only people I knew that had email addresses at the time were other students. My mom still used a typewriter at work and my dad had 8 feet tall metal file cabinets against the walls of his office filled with shipping and receiving orders and a desk piled with papers, a corded phone, and an adding machine. I remember in the late 80’s, when my dad got his car phone, corded and factory wired into the car, and the other kids being impressed as he took calls at school drop off. That was advanced. In the 1990s, people witnessed an explosion of technology which has increasingly led to a change in how and where people work.
How times have changed. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2000, just half of Americans had internet access at home. Today, that number sits at more than 90%. On a global scale, less than 7% of the world was online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet. The iPhone was not far behind; Apple introduced the first one in 2001. At the start of the 2000s, there were 740 million cellphone subscriptions worldwide. Two decades later, that number has surpassed 8 billion, meaning there are now more cellphones in the world than people.
Today, technology has changed every facet of our lives at increasing speed. Technology is in the air, water, electricity, food, education, work, communication, shopping, travel, and our money. It’s almost everywhere and in everything in our daily life. One of the biggest ways technologies has changed our daily lives is in how we communicate. Communication is at the core of change and as technology has quickened, so has the pace of change. Traditional methodologies of change no longer are sufficient and faster methodologies like Agile are being used across the business landscape on all change projects and are no longer limited to technology and new software implementation projects.
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