The 1980’s were an exciting time period to be part of. People who lived through that decade saw the world change completely right before their eyes. With the Reagan Boom and technology advancements the world literally opened up. Capitalism brought the entire world together as one religion.
Capitalism and Globalization became the hot beds on which the drama of Business Process Re-engineering and Software technology unfolded pushing the world as we knew it until then, to new limits.
Jack Welch became the CEO of GE in 1981 and with a new era of Business Process Re-engineering emerged. The focus shifted from efficiency to quality with efficiency. Software enabled process automation made its appearance going hand in hand with the kind of changes Jack Welch was inspiring in Management practices. This enabled a completely new industry of IT services who offered implementation and support services around the monolithic products that were being built. Organizations bought software and customized it extensively for their unique processes.
The control and access to Technology remained with a relatively small number of users in these Organizations. These were the Admin users in every department that was set up in the Sloan age. They collected data from different corners of the organization, fed them into their computers and used that to manage their processes. Technologies deployed within an Organization remained out of access and knowledge of those who actually were part of the process.
The Technology revolution helped organizations step up their game. The supply chain and other processes improved and it became easier to record and track activities and updates. This was also a period of the Globalization revolution which enabled opening up of the borders and moving jobs to low cost countries. This trend started reshaping the entire job demographics. The developed countries became the centres of knowledge attracting knowledge workers and business and technical innovation while blue collar jobs moved to low cost markets. The developed countries, which extensively bought and deployed technologies to manage their business processes now had more intelligent users across the board who could use a computer.