Technology In The Workplace

You name the industry and the chances are that over the past century

, most if not all of their work has been transformed by technology. Jobs in everything from agriculture to astronomy have been radically changed from what they were before the industrial revolution and it seems extremely unlikely that things will ever be the same again.

In some areas, technology has had an extremely direct and visible effect in transforming industry.

In manufacturing for example, the factory system of manual labour that replaced the artisan system has been in turn replaced by a largely automated system of complex machinery. What once took hundreds and hundreds of man-hours and gallons of blood, sweat and tears to make has become mainly a job of getting the computers programmed properly, making sure the equipment is in alignment and keeping an eye on the conveyor belt.

Retail is another area where the growth of technology has dramatically changed the established system. Although the high-street shop and world-wide chain of commerce is a relatively new introduction of the 20th century, the growth of the internet has created an entirely new marketplace - eCommerce. People can now run entire businesses via virtual interfaces, or they can shop for anything from clothes to a car or even groceries online.

'Behind-the-scenes' areas of work such as bureaucracy or the creative industries have also been transformed by this change in the zeitgeist. Where once administrators had to deal with miles of paperwork, now they have a single file. Where once something as simple as a payroll system required an entire separate department of dedicated workers, now an automated system can calculate everything from hours worked to taxes due without stress.

Of course, though technology has transformed other areas of industry, the biggest change it's increasing importance made to the world of work is the creation of an entirely new role in in almost every workplace - tech support. Unsurprisingly, even those who work with equipment every single day are often unfamiliar with how they could fix it if it went wrong. They may be the best at their task - and computers/networks/etc could be a huge part of that task - but they can easily go from day to day without needing the know-how to solve technical problems themselves.

It's not a stretch of the imagination to say that without these experts - the people in tech support teams or in dedicated hardware and software companies - that the modern way of doing things would be unsustainable. In the same way that a freight haul company relies upon mechanical knowhow to keep its vehicles on the road, a modern bureaucracy (or even a travel agents) relies upon software engineers and hardware consultants.

by: Edward Parker

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