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by Anura K.T. De Silva

The 1980s were about quality, 1990s were about re-engineering and 2000s were about velocity. One wonders, how quickly will the natures of business and society change as information access will alter the lifestyles of people and their expectations giving rapid rise to improvements in quality and service improvements.

When the increase in velocity of business is great enough, the very nature of business changes. A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours instead of weeks is no longer at heart a product company, but a service company that has a product offering. These changes could only occur due to the flow of digital information.

Some banks and industries in Sri Lanka were automated in the last five to ten years mostly due to the pressures put upon by their foreign principals but rarely initiated internally to improve their own processes.

As an example, a private Insurance Company in year 2000 spent over Rs. 90 Million to merely purchase a business system designed for a decade ago and is still struggling to get the best use of the system and a leading chain of garment manufacturers spent over US $3 million and is continuing to spend in Millions of dollars, yet most of the information is in paper form and the process of interacting with buyers and sellers remained unchanged.

Digital tools

Most companies are using extremely expensive digital tools to run their production systems, crank the back office functions, generate customer invoices, and handle accounting in the same old ways as most of them had primarily automated old processes.

Very few companies have used digital technology for new processes that could radically improve how they function, give them the full benefit of all their employees' capabilities, and give them the speed of response needed to compete in the emerging high-speed global business world.

Most companies do not realise that the tools to accomplish these changes are now available to everyone. Though at heart, most business problems are information problems, almost no one is using information well. Too many senior managers take the absence of timely information as a given and often to their advantage.

People have lived for so long without information at their fingertips that they don't realise what they are missing.

It is appalling how much some of these local companies invest on IT and how little they get in the way of actionable information when the CEOs could demand a flow of information that would give them quick and tangible knowledge about what was really happening with their customers.

Most companies have invested over 80% of the technology investment in the basic building blocks: PCs for productivity applications, networks and e-mail for communications, basic business applications that can give it a healthy flow of information, yet they typically get only less than 20% of the benefits that is possible.

The gap between what companies are spending and what they're getting stems from the combination of not understanding what is possible and failing to see the potential through industrial age lenses, when technology is used to move the right information quickly to everyone in the company.

But often, these companies would blow their IT trumpets loud enough of the money they spent and not the return on the investment.

For the first time, all kinds of information-numbers, text, sound, video-can be put into a digital form that any computer can store, process, and forward on a standard hardware combined with a standard software platform creating economies of scale that can make powerful computing solutions available inexpensively to organisations of all sizes. Unlike anytime before, 'Personal' in Personal Computer means that individual knowledge workers have a powerful tool for analysing and using the information delivered by these solutions.

All these capabilities are further magnified by the improvements, availability and affordability of the Internet to give us worldwide connectivity: to be in the backyard of our customers located in any corner across the globe. In the digital age, 'connectivity' has taken on a broader meaning than simply putting two or more people in touch as it creates a new universal space for information sharing, collaboration and commerce.

Jobs that most companies are doing with information today, would have been fine several years ago as getting rich information was prohibitively expensive and tools for analysing and disseminating weren't available in the 1980s and even early 1990s.

But today at the edge of the 21st century, tools and connectivity of the digital age now gives us a way to easily obtain, share, and act on information in new remarkable ways.

But in actuality, one wonders if it would be ever possible in Sri Lanka or in many former colonial lands to share, collaborate and serve one another to achieve common goals to achieve their own economic prosperity.

At a time when we live at the peak of social distrust and lack of direction continued through power and class struggles, there are many not so developed countries that has embraced this technology together to transform their lifestyles and their world how remote they live.

They have replaced paper processes with collaborative digital processes and reduce their costs, minimised time taken and improved their operational processes and transformed the results towards the richness to their lives, families and loved ones.

Motivated teams

They have infused their society with a new level of electronic-based intelligence-nothing metaphysical or highly technical that only developed nations could do.

Groups of people are using electronic tools to act together almost as fast as a single person could act, but with the insights of the entire team.

Highly motivated teams are getting the benefit of everyone's thinking. With faster access to information about sales, partner activities and most importantly the customers, organisations are able to react faster to problems and opportunities.

These remotely located developing countries are treating the technology as a God given gift to them.

They have shelved every other development and diverted their entire focus and investments towards developing a new digital infrastructure, as an essential need to function in the digital age.

They consider it seriously like the human nervous system.

Just like how the biological nervous system that triggers our reflexes could react quickly to danger or need, the infrastructure is used to make choices, discuss, transact on factual information and run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities and for the public to receive valuable information to interact with informed thoughts and ideas.

Success story

The digital nervous system is distinguished from a mere network of computers by the accuracy, immediacy, and richness of the information it brings to knowledge workers and the insight and collaboration made possible by the information.

As a result of driving the flow of information and helping the public, government as well as the private sector can run their operations much better, they realised that when they did a good job in information flow, individual solutions came more easily.

By reducing tax fraud through a transparent tax information system, government was able to provide better services at much lesser costs eventually reducing tax burdens put on the public. Because a digital nervous system benefited every community, government services, public services and the nation as a whole; leaders were able to step up to change the bitter minds and culture established through the colonial masters and reorient the nation, away from petty rivalry, power struggles berried within authoritarian structure to a participative culture, giving rise to trust, collaboration and high economic growth: what we once enjoyed within our rural lives.

As the goal of the digital nervous system was to stimulate a concerted response among all stakeholders to reinvent the way they worked from the prior established norms, they satisfied each stakeholder by making decisions quickly, acting efficiently, and directly touching each other in much positive ways achieving national economic success in the 21st century.

One wonders, if this is the success story of Sri Lanka told in the 22nd century to other non-developing nations?

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