I actually started this musing a couple years ago, but never quite finished it. Publishing it today, ahead of a completely new post.
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I was talking with someone, and it occurred to me that if you are roughly 45 years old or younger, you have likely never worked in an office setting that didn't have email.My daughter, who teaches high school, reminds me that every kid in high school has been born in this century. The Kindergarten class of 2001 are starting to pick up their Doctorates.
Tempus fugit.
I often shake my head at the apparent pace of change in the workplace. Twenty years ago, it was a rare hotel that offered Internet access. Today, we complain if a hotel doesn't have a reliable connection, no matter where the hotel is.
Let me step through the changes over the past thirty years or so...
In 1985, when I first started working in an office setting, a desktop computer was a novelty. You'd see some computer terminals that were used to access mainframe applications, but the average worker was using paper and pen. You may have had a typewriter at your desk, or shared one with a few others. If you were a boss, you had someone to type your memos and letters. Everything was likely paper-based. Memos were copied and circulated by Inter-office mail. Letters went out through the postal service or, for something urgent, a facsimile machine was available. A reply to a letter might come in a week or so.
In 1988, I started my second job. I walked in to the office and saw a brand new desktop computer at my workspace. I had little idea of what to do with it. I had a learning curve. At first, it was a glorified typewriter. But I learned that we could design forms and start to create databases and spreadsheets. Then we networked the computers in the office together. We could share files and more effectively share the printers. But it was still paper-oriented. We were still an organization of memos and letters, but we could create more of them, faster.
By 1992, when I started my next job, I expected to find a computer at my desk. These were networked for printer and file sharing and we had something called PROFS installed on the computer. PROFS enabled us to email other people in the company. It even had a point to point single line texting capability.
At home, I bought a computer in 1993 and started using America On-Line. It was an isolated world, but I could get email from far-flung places using something called the Internet.
In 1996, the consulting firm I joined handed me a laptop computer. I was amazed when I walked into an office in another city, plugged in my computer, and it worked just like it did in my normal office.
In 1998, my next employer also gave me a laptop -- from here on out, I never used a desktop computer. Shortly after I joined the company, I traveled to another city and found myself in a hotel with Internet access. The firm was trying out a new way to get email over the Internet and I was once again amazed at a new breakthrough.
Somewhere around the turn of the century, I stopped using dial up and started using DSL and had full time Internet availability at home.
Email was rapidly becoming a problem. For a company with over 10,000 employees, email had piled up to over 3 Terabytes of data and was expensive to maintain. We put a project together to reduce the storage by one-third and save $3,000,000 a year.
When I started a new job in 2007, I attended a meeting early on about the storage problem we were having with our document management system. It had passed 50 Terabytes and people were becoming concerned. We quickly determined, however, that the cost of storage was actually a minor point and the cost of holding meetings to discuss storage costs was probably more expensive than the storage we would eliminate.
By 2017, when I started my current job, a terabyte hard drive on a laptop or desktop computer was a common thing. You expected to walk in to your workspace and find two wide screen computer screens set up. And now the cloud is coming on strong. Access to work email and stored files is as close as your mobile device. Not having that access is seen as "behind the times".
I sometimes think about my work journey. When I started working, I carried a huge briefcase because I was going out in the field and filling out paper forms that needed to be brought back to the office and sent to someone to type up. Today, I carry a smaller computer bag, with very little paper in it, but a whole lot of access to data. Heck, the mobile phone on my belt can enable me to work anywhere on the planet at any time, as long as I have a data or wi-fi connection. We produce data at prodigious rates. Email is our primary means of communication. We easily communicate globally. Libraries of information are at our fingertips. The people coming to the workplace take all this for granted. They expect things to happen quickly.
My former career was based upon managing records. In 1985, those records were mostly paper. Today, they are seldom paper -- or only exist in paper form for a brief period of time. I passed someone in the hall one day carrying three big accordion files of paper records. He had found them and was on his way to the shredder.
Email was rapidly becoming a problem. For a company with over 10,000 employees, email had piled up to over 3 Terabytes of data and was expensive to maintain. We put a project together to reduce the storage by one-third and save $3,000,000 a year.
When I started a new job in 2007, I attended a meeting early on about the storage problem we were having with our document management system. It had passed 50 Terabytes and people were becoming concerned. We quickly determined, however, that the cost of storage was actually a minor point and the cost of holding meetings to discuss storage costs was probably more expensive than the storage we would eliminate.
By 2017, when I started my current job, a terabyte hard drive on a laptop or desktop computer was a common thing. You expected to walk in to your workspace and find two wide screen computer screens set up. And now the cloud is coming on strong. Access to work email and stored files is as close as your mobile device. Not having that access is seen as "behind the times".
I sometimes think about my work journey. When I started working, I carried a huge briefcase because I was going out in the field and filling out paper forms that needed to be brought back to the office and sent to someone to type up. Today, I carry a smaller computer bag, with very little paper in it, but a whole lot of access to data. Heck, the mobile phone on my belt can enable me to work anywhere on the planet at any time, as long as I have a data or wi-fi connection. We produce data at prodigious rates. Email is our primary means of communication. We easily communicate globally. Libraries of information are at our fingertips. The people coming to the workplace take all this for granted. They expect things to happen quickly.
My former career was based upon managing records. In 1985, those records were mostly paper. Today, they are seldom paper -- or only exist in paper form for a brief period of time. I passed someone in the hall one day carrying three big accordion files of paper records. He had found them and was on his way to the shredder.
