Pace of change 2

Change is constant. We all know that. But in a fast moving world, change takes much longer than we expect. I remember in the mid-1990s talking at conferences about how, with intranets, the paperless office was almost with us. Yet today, for many organisations that is still not reality. When social media started to gain traction three or four years ago, we all said it was going to have a fundamental impact on business. But when? In my experience, what we think will happen quickly, takes much longer.

Not long ago adoption of technology used to lag behind the technology – we’d have a new system, but persuading people to use it was often the hard part. However, now we often find the technology we want is struggling to keep up with the way we use it. Which is great because it gives us the opportunity to drive technology developments from real, not imaginary, demand.