R Das

I firmly believe that technology does not only have a bearing on national and international business, but technology and business are strongly inter related. One grows with the other, and necessitates a realization of an unique concept of the holy union of business and technology, which I would like to call “biztech”. In the following article I will try to establish this idea. The first thing that might strike a bit odd to my readers is the use of the word “holy”. Let me clarify why I chose this word before some holy people raise an eyebrow(pun was unintentional!!). The word holy means  spiritually whole or sound; dedicated to a religious purpose . This union of technology and business although man made, we throughout the entire human evolution had no idea how we are shaping up something of such magnitude which not only dictate the way we earn our living, but also how we live our life. Although its materialistic in nature, but still there is some wholesomeness to this idea which makes it have an uncanny resemblance to spirituality, so earthly yet so heavenly. Its religious purpose is to serve mankind. Well I would not like my readers to delve into the philosophy of this article straight away, which I shall certainly reintroduce at the end. So without further adieu, lets dive into the sea of original purpose!

The moment we come across the term “business”, the first thing that flashes in our inner eye are bundles of cash. Money gives us the power to buy what we need, what we want, what we cant live without. But, lets dig a bit deeper, what was going on in this world before the advent of cash, or money in the standard form?

We had the barter system, hence the ancestor of monetary system is the barter system. Bartering is a medium in which goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods and/or services without a common unit of exchange(without the use of money). A farmer could exchange his produce for the fish obtained by a fisherman or the cloth produced by a weaver. So farmer produced his crops using own methods, the fisherman caught his fishes using his own methods, again the weaver weaved clothes in his own method.

Now, if the farmer didn’t have the method to farm, he wouldn’t be able to exchange his product for anything else. The same can be said about the weaver and the fisherman. Now, this method which is unique to each of these people can be called technology. So we see that technology had a hand to play even at the very nascent form of business. Lets move forward in time and witness how unknowingly man had used both technology and business in unison. Soon man found out that barter system had its convoluted drawbacks. Dickering over the relative value of different things tends to be time-consuming and troublesome, and so societies tended to converge towards a common medium of exchange. Aztecs used cacao beans, the main ingredient of chocolate, though it seems a bit unlikely that this was the origin of the modern term of "bean-counter" for an accountant; livestock was common among herding cultures; slaves were sometimes used, too, but they were much harder to control than cattle and so not as popular; and many cultures used salt, including the Romans for a time, leading to the modern term "salary". The use of salt and cacao beans(main ingredient of chocolate) points towards the development of technology. Thus making it necessary account for it in business as well. The medium that gradually gained widespread acceptance was precious metals such as gold and silver. Ancient Egypt was one of the first lands to establish transactions using precious metals, though their forms were variable -- rings, bars, wafers, and so on. Coins are said to have been invented by the Lydians, a people of Asia Minor, sometime after 640 BC, using stamped ingots of "electrum", a naturally occurring amalgam of silver and gold. The scheme was refined by King Croesus, ruler of Lydia from 560 to 546 BC, who introduced coins of true gold. He became identified with wealth in the antique expression "rich as Croesus".Introduction of coinage was a great boost to commerce, simplifying transactions and allowing them to be conducted more rationally over long distances. The Greeks picked up the idea of coins from the Lydians; since the Greeks had a colonial and trading empire that ringed the Mediterranean, they spread their coinage, such as the "stater" and various multiples of the "drachma", along all the shores of the sea. When Alexander the Great engaged in a campaign of conquest in the 4th century BC that took him to the borders of India, he kept his troops loyal by paying them in coin, and also helped spread the idea further. I need to mention to my readers where I am driving home with these information so far. Its pretty hard not see the technological factor involved even in developing the idea of money as we know today.Coins are still with us, though they are now little more than tokens made of non-precious metals.Lets have a look at paper money……When the first paper money was introduced in China a millennium ago, many must have thought it was just as great a joke. Who would rest their fortunes in mere pieces of paper? Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor who ruled China in the 13th century, emphasized that it wasn't a joke when he decreed that those who refused to accept paper money would be executed. He also confiscated all gold and silver, even that carried in by foreign visitors. This was the purpose of Chinese paper money: to ensure total state control over precious metals. It was effectively a totalitarian measure.

Once again paper money came into existence because of paper. Thus again showing us how technology is paving the way to the basic idea of money. chinese paper money did work well enough for a time; Marco Polo was impressed by the system during his visit to the Middle Kingdom. However, if there was a tendency to debase coins, the temptation to simply print more paper money regardless of the consequences was often irresistible, and public confidence in paper money was weak anyway. In 1294, paper money was forcibly introduced in Persia, but led to economic disaster. Even in China, paper money had been more or less abandoned by the 15th century.The notion of paper money began to reemerge in Europe at the end of the 17th century. According to tradition, the first European to introduce paper money was a Swedish banker named Johan Palmstruch, whose Stockholm Banco began to issue the stuff in 1661. The offering went well enough at first, but success led to the bank's overextension. Palmstruch, like any good modern banker, called to the government for financial help. Unlike a modern banker, he was taken to trial for mismanagement and sentenced to death, though the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.Even though its looks like a big slap on paper money, paper money did not die. Needless to say that till now a lot of inventions took place, thus technology was moving ahead too.Like the invention of guns, cannons etc. lets see how technology and business get even more intimate.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions starting in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spreading throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world. The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human history; almost every aspect of daily life was eventually influenced in some way.

Starting in the later part of the 18th century there began a transition in parts of Great Britain’s previously manual labour and draft-animal–based economy towards machine based manufacturing. It started with the mechanisation of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways.The introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal, wider utilisation of  water wheels and powered machinery (mainly in textile industries) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries. The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world, a process that continues as industrialisation. The impact of this change on society was enormous. As this process took place, businesses grew rapidly all over the world. All parts of the world were getting more and more accessible. Every business men want more money thus, making it inevitable for all of them to make use of technology.

…..AND GOES ON!!!!

Hence all industries started booming, many business houses grew from local providers to global giant in the following years. Once again we cannot fail to see the link between business and technology. If industrial revolution made business and technology star crossed lovers, the later half of 20th century made them inseparable. Lets have a look at that.

Now we move into the electronic age, which witnessed the birth of the “blockbuster” of all of mankinds creation……COMPUTER. Not only did it change our lifestyle at a blazing pace, but paved the way for things we couldn’t even dream of earlier. The very concept of money I discussed earlier got concocted into something entirely different.Modern computer-based commerce is rooted in the "charge card", which evolved roughly in parallel with the computer. The first modern charge card was issued by Diner's Club in 1950, being created in part by a financier named Frank X. McNamara, who as the story has it was embarrassed when he came up short for a restaurant bill. The original Diner's Club card actually made of pasteboard, with plastic not introduced until 1955. The Diner's Club card was only really honored by a network of restaurants, making it a convenience for the wealthy so they didn't have to carry around large amounts of cash or fumble with checks.Soon this shaped into credit cards, ATM cards as we know it today. Once again I would like my readers to draw their attention how technology and business is going hand in hand. With the introduction of credit and debit cards, it gave banks and financial institution another business opportunity.

The electronics industry paved ways for different gadgets, which were not only used by businesses to sell to consumers, but was used to run the business as well. The rise of the Internet also saw the introduction of purely online financial transaction systems.

The most popular at present is the "PayPal" system, which was founded in 1998 and as of 2009 had 70 million accounts worldwide.A very simple example would be Microsoft excel, which was developed to maintain data of various formats. It was sold to many businesses, thus making it a big business for Microsoft, and what did these businesses do with excel, they used it to run their own business. If the were any drawbacks because of the technology, Microsoft improved their product, which lead further business. One can easily see how things are running in circles, it can make any one giddy.

Lets have a look at the decade of 2000-2009:

In 2002: AOL and Time Warner merged to form a company of at 200 billion dollars,Although Time Warner sold AOL to the public for 3 billion dollar spin off in 2009.

The year 2000 started with a bang which it wasn’t, the feared y2k bug never really showed up, although millions of dollars were spent to develop a fix.

In the year 2000 nasdaq peaked at over 5000, but within months thanks to internet bubble burst, it crashed way below 2000. Funny, that we could get this information because of technology, which was again the root of this downfall.

But nevertheless technology was infront and centre, in 2001 Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia , the ambitious online encyclopedia project, which anyone can access and edit the contents.If Wikipedia was a private company it would be worth 5 billion dollars.That year apple introduced i-pod, ensuring their reign in digital media for the rest of the decade, which again is worth millions of dollars. Then Apple came up with the hot and slick i-pad

In 2004 google was launched, it’s a high profile company worth over 100 billion dollars today. In the same year Mark Zuckerberg started social networking website facebook. Which today is worth atleast 10 billion dollars.

2005 saw the launch of youtube by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, in just 18 months google bought youtube for 1.5 billion dollars. In 2006 twitter was launched, it ended the decade as the technology “it” company, if we can call twitter technology that is!!

In 2007 apple launched the i-phone which revolutionized the phone industry, the way it did to music industry.

So what we see here ?????

New businesses were born from new tecnologies, again to keep the same businesses running and growing needed technology as well. One cant live without the other, and

each is feeding on the other and growing exponentially. They both are parasite and hosts for each other, and slowly mutating into one whole organism “biztech”.Every business today makes use of technology to run their day to day affairs, and then there are businesses who run on selling and improving the very same technology!!!!This business and technology love affair would put Shakespeare’s star crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet to shame!

At the Forrester’s IT Forum 2007. The seven things Forrester Research Chairman and Chief Executive Officer George Colony would say to any CEO in the world>>>

1. It's not IT anymore … it's BT.The gloss: BT is now your business, and your business is technology: information technology affects revenue, profit, market share, cost reduction and the loss of a ton of money if one of those wires you used to equate with IT gets cut.

2. When it comes to technology … stop being clueless. The gloss: A board of directors would never let a CEO get away with not knowing anything about finance or marketing. The CEO has to understand in general terms what the technology is about and how it is changing his or her business and customers.

3. It's not always the CIO's fault … in some cases, it's your fault.The gloss: The big, expensive SAP implementation blew up, so you fired the CIO. What about you, who brought in customer resource management but didn't change the way the sales force is organized or how the company does business, so it failed? BT is not about fault; it is about collaboration.

4. You need four players to get business technology right.The gloss: The four are: a CEO who is not clueless about IT; technology

knowledgeable business executives, or TKBEs; the CIO; and a "techie" on the board of directors.

5. The CIO should not be -- indeed cannot be -- the driving force behind business process change and innovation.The gloss: Process and innovation is about the business, which is run by other executives.

6. Technology+process+organization.The gloss: Technology can't function in a vacuum; it needs the right process and the right organization to work.

7. When you're looking for your next CIO, look for a teacher.The gloss: IT executives are in the business of helping other executives understand what technology can do for the business.

So is technology an important factor having a bearing on businesses world wide??? Its not a factor anymore, its one and the same. Like I said I would certainly delve a bit into philosophy……..We humans have managed to outdo ourselves, we created something time and again which is moving us up the ladder of civilization. But more often than not we don’t realize the potential of our invention, our own ideas which it bears on the future. We are inventing gadgets, which even we don’t understand. Is “biztech”one such a concept which will surpass our understanding? Or is it a part of cosmic pattern which we fail to recognize? Or is the human brain the holy grail?