subject: 3 Ways Technology Has Transformed The Office [print this page] The digital revolution has touched practically every aspect of modern life, both personally and professionally.
However, few areas have been affected quite so profoundly as the office workplace. Advances in hardware, software and the increased uptake of digital technology has revolutionised administrative tasks and gone on to transform offices in every industry.
Although many people deride their computers, the truth is that the office of the early 21st century is a much easier place to work than the office of the early 20th century. Depending on the industry or sector, the chances are a digital system has entirely replaced what was once a time-consuming physical practice. Perhaps the two biggest areas of general office work that have been improved are:
It's easy to underestimate this given the unfulfilled hype of the "paperless office" but frankly, today's offices are much nicer places simply because of how much easier it is to keep accurate records. It's not going too far to say that electronic documents have been a panacea to many of the complaints made by office workers over the years.
Whilst an electric document that covers years and years of transactions, spreadsheets, reports and so forth in just a few megabytes, before the digital revolution this would have taken up entire rooms. Plus it was a lot harder to keep track of.
To have any hope of finding the relevant piece of paper, an exact procedure had to be followed by each member of staff who came into contact with the document. Everybody who touched a document had to put it back in the right place, in the right folder in the right drawer in the right room. If you wanted to find a document, you had to follow the same procedure in reverse. Now the chances are you can find it in seconds just by typing a search query into your computer.
Email
With email, offices around the world suddenly became connected far more effectively than the phone system could ever have managed. Not just because an email doesn't demand real-time communication (though it takes just seconds to send) but also because it allows you to send more than just words - and it gives you a record of everything sent.
As you can imagine this can be incredibly useful - people can send draft proposals, memos, images, any kind of message in seconds to a location either within walking distance or on the other side of the globe.
