an article i once wrote on business and technology

1. R Das

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. …..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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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?