BPI Project Walk Through – Understanding People and Process
Business Process Improvement projects are ideally suited for every business operation, especially to augment the process efficiency, to implement process changes and to take the business operations to the next level and meet with the Business demands and Customer expectations. For any BPI project to be successful, the leadership and the ownership of the Business […]
Human Resource Information System (HRIS): Meaning, Evolution and its Features
In the contemporary scenario of modernization and globalization, organizations heavily rely upon technological advancement and innovation in the field of Information Technology. Advancements in the field of IT has opened up newer avenues for the organizations and provided a competitive advantage by using innovative and customized solutions. It has become an integral part of the […]
Should Prices Always Rise?
The modern economy is obsessed with rising prices. An era of falling prices is called deflation. It is almost always considered to be bad news from an economic point of view. The commonly held viewpoint is that falling prices create negative sentiments and ultimately to a recession. Falling prices have been given the name “deflation”. […]
Factors behind the Rise of the Swiss Economy
Western Europe has been an economic powerhouse. Superpowers like Germany and Great Britain have been a part of this region. However, the small landlocked country of Switzerland has turned out to be a more viable economic model when compared to these so-called superpowers. For many years, economists have been completely baffled by this stupendous growth […]
Finished Goods Supply Chain Operations
FG Supply Chain consists of all activities involved in movement, storage and distribution of Finished Goods from the Delivery point of Plant to the Point of Sale. In the case of global supply chains, supply chain management gets more complicated with the variations arising out of different countries regulations and logistical practices. Computer Hardware supply […]
The urge to create a perfect world has been there throughout the ages. However, whereas earlier attempts at doing so were guided by people with hands on effort and intimate contact with the on the ground realities, the present move towards using technology is often misplaced as it focuses on using tools like social media without actually getting down to the nuts and bolts of on the ground action.
In other words, the problems being faced by the world need concerted action that is bottom up and which involves action from those working directly with the victims instead of top down approaches using social media that are out of tune with the ground realities. Of course, this does not mean to say that technology cannot solve any problem, as there are many examples of using technology as a means of spreading awareness and knowledge.
The point here is that technology requires human action in concert with each other and not necessarily one without the other.
The other aspect of trying to solve all problems using technology is that the internet can do only that much and not more. This means that while the internet is good for bringing together people and as can be seen in the positive impact that it had on building better lives for many, it is indeed an agent of change. However, the urge to fix everything using the internet alone must be resisted solely because it has its limitations in that geographical considerations and the need to have on the ground presence are factors that the internet cannot solve. Further, there is the added aspect of the digital divide, which means that the majority of the citizens in the world do not have access to the internet, and hence, the limits to what technology can accomplish are made plainly evident here.
The third aspect is that the proponents of the lets fix everything using technology aspire for a utopian situation that resembles absolute perfectionism. What these well meaning advocates forget is that complexity and ambiguity as well as opacity and imperfection are built into the world and hence, aspiring to social good must take into account all these factors.
In other words, the human condition can be improved only through sustained and concerted effort that takes time and not the kind of instant solution based model that is proposed. Apart from this, the fact that technology is value neutral means that it can be used for good as well as for bad. Hence, the temptation to advance technological solutions for all problems might backfire because of the same technology falling into the wrong hands to create havoc.
Finally, we must make it clear that this article is not a pessimistic one which dismisses technology altogether. Just that we would like to make it clear that striving to use technology to solve all problems must be based on realistic assumptions and as the subsequent articles detail, the internet can indeed be used to deliver infinite progress provided some of the conditions discussed here are met.
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Continuous Improvement and Business Process Re-Engineering
February 12, 2025
