Topics >  Sales and Marketing >  Sales > 

How Has Technology Changed the Way You Do Your Job?

Various businesspeople comment on their use of technology.

Technology is changing business for everyone from media stars to best-selling authors, from retail-store owners to venture capitalists. Chances are, it's affected your business, too

Walk into almost any business, big or small, and you'll quickly see how technology has transformed the way we work. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a bike courier, or a criminal lawyer, one thing is clear: our lives are surrounded by technology that just a handful of years ago would have seemed unfathomable.

How, for example, did we live without the fax machine? The fax machine, which was actually invented by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain in 1842, came onto the scene in the mid-1960s when a court decision allowed non-telephone-company products access to telephone-company lines. In 1986, by which time lower-cost, easier-to-use models had hit the market, 200,000 fax machines were sold. That number soared to 2.2 million in 1991. By the end of 1995, sales of the now-ubiquitous machines are expected to reach a staggering 5 million units.

How has that and other types of technology changed business? The way we do our jobs? We posed those questions to dozens of business owners, technologists, and celebrities. The answers often surprised us, but they did not disappoint. And more often than not, they told us as much about the respondents themselves as they did about the technology that has insinuated itself into their lives.

* * *

Ben Narasin
CEO of Boston Prepatory Co., a 12-employee clothing designer and manufacturer in New York City

Technology has made us more responsive, more able to gain access to information over a broader spectrum. It has taken our information and, instead of putting it into little cubbyholes of the company, made it broadly accessible. Technology is basically a slave to the information you give it. But it makes that information much more functional and dynamic. A filing cabinet is just a box of papers; the same information set up on a computer on a network can give you a dynamic sense of your customers. You can pull up the history of your customers -- the way they pay their bills, what they're talking about -- and you get a feeling for them. It's about making the most out of what you already have. It gives you $10 worth of value from every $1 of information.

When technology breaks down, it makes you realize how effective it is when it's working. Its value hits home when there is a piece of information outside your spectrum, and you're so aggravated that you say, "I can't believe I have to go look for this here!" You almost come to assume that everything should be right at your fingertips at the click of a mouse.

* * *

Mitchell Kertzman
Founder, chairman, and CEO of $51-million Powersoft Corp., in Concord, Mass.

One of the big issues in our business is using electronic customer support, in which people, instead of calling the hot line, will use either the on-line forums that we support or CD-ROMs on which we put very extensive amounts of support. We try culturally to get people to use the electronic support instead of the telephone, in similar ways that banks tried to get people to use ATMs [automated-teller machines] rather than tellers. Banks succeeded because it turned out that it genuinely was quicker and easier to use an ATM than to use a teller. Similarly, people will find that alternative means of customer support are quicker and easier, too.

* * *

Harriet Rubin
Executive editor, Currency/Doubleday, New York City

People are working harder and are more enslaved to their work than before. People I know are walking around with beepers, with laptops or organizers, with portable phones. They're becoming slaves to high technology. So it's not high-tech, it's kind of high-shackles or high-manacles. There's no escape.

Still, my greatest companion is a subnotebook. And technology has changed the nature of the manuscripts I'm seeing. I'm getting stuff that's more creative, maybe because the technology is freeing authors from a lot of the drudgery of writing, so they can get more involved with the ideas and can play more with words.

Technology doesn't get enough credit for being the feminists' friend. Technology has killed hierarchy. When you get into companies that have E-mail systems, you don't have to be the loudest man or the biggest braggart. It flattens gender differences.

* * *

David E. Kelley
Creator and executive producer of Picket Fences and Chicago Hope and executive producer of L.A. Law

I am probably the least technical person you'll ever meet. I don't even own a computer, much less use one. I'm one of those people whose VCR blinks at 12:00, 24 hours a day, although I've managed to get pretty good with the remote.

But I am a big fan of technology when it's used to make our lives simpler, and it's done that in the editing room for the past five years. Everything's on computer, so you can change scenes with the push of a button. No longer do you have to take out film and cut it and wait an hour before you can see the same scene again. Now you can see the scene within minutes. It's an enormous boost to anybody in television who's turning over shows weekly. Now, could I explain how the machines work? Not for a second. Do they make my life easier? Do I depend on them? Yes, absolutely.

With Picket Fences we shoot everything in Los Angeles. All the snow you see is computer generated. I don't know how the technology works. The film just goes to the lab, and when it comes back there's snow on the ground.

One of the seedlings in my head when I was developing Chicago Hope was how technology is changing the face of medicine. Doctors are having to learn new ways to perform procedures. We took tours of hospitals, where we'd see doctors demonstrating various procedures, and they'd say, sounding somewhat discouraged, that they'll learn how to do a procedure and then five years later it will have become obsolete. The technology will change. So that's part of the show. We treat technology as one of the characters of Chicago Hope Hospital, juxtaposing it against the human element.

Read more:

Hot or Not? What the Web Thinks About Your Brand

Super Bowl XLVI: 3 Winning Ads

5 Ways to Look More Professional

Sign-up for our Sales and Marketing Newsletter

Email Address: