What is the proper word to describe the revolution of
Information Technology?
A lot of people might find “digital” or “digitalization” well
suited to explain the trend. I do agree, but “digitalization” is hard to be comprehended
by the layman on how the 0 and 1 or bits
and bytes did wonders for changing the world. I choose “integration” as the
single word that clearly shows the changes.
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| Integration |
When PCs invaded offices in the late 80s, some different
types of works used to handle by different people, later consolidated to be managed
by a lesser few. For example,
typist is a bygone job. Why need a typist when you can write on your own
PC? For the newspaper industry in
the pro-PC era, typesetters used to typeset titles in different typefaces and
font size, and contents in smaller point size, and later pass their work to
designers to cut and paste with the related photos to construct full pages - but
now things have changed as sub-editors took over the task of paginating a whole
page.
When PCs were introduced, some workflows were fast to become
redundant. The multi-tasking of PCs and transferable of data destroyed plenty of
old rules and joined many related professions together. It made the used-to-be
natural workflow become unnatural, and started a reformation based on the
integration of jobs.
Later when the Internet connected every PC in the world to
become one giant web network, the norm of integration was more apparent. A lot of small merchants saw the
opportunity and forayed online; but to succeed, they have to show how good
their integration ability is. Because to open a brick and mortar store you’ll
need money and some intelligence, but to open an online store, you need money
with much more intelligence. The complexity to integrate the sales of tangible
products in an intangible system sometimes is beyond comprehension.
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| Integration |
When cloud-computing started becoming the megatrend, the
complexity of the integration level is at all heights - customers, billing,
payment, sales & marketing, technical support, products & applications,
admin & control, etc., are all intertwined. The biggest challenge for the
vendor is keeping the complexity behind doors, and displaying the simplicity up
front.
And finally, our TimeTec Cloud is making a debut for
customers to try after we opened for resellers to register in July. I use this single word, “integration”
to conclude our three months of hardwork, and brain-straining labors. And yet
we can’t expect any congratulatory flower basket delivered to our storefront;
to hope for the glitches to be reduced to a very minimum is good enough.
While all integration efforts go to TimeTec Cloud, another
integration task is turned on: consolidating the FingerTec USA website into FingerTec
main portal, as a move to promote the effective share of online resources.
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