Around the World in 80 Nanoseconds

By: Rick McCallion

With all due respect and apologies to Jules Verne, I ponder today how technology has affected the speed at which we can communicate.

It was often said the invention of the airplane made the world “smaller”.  Certainly, no-one ever took this literally, but the concept is  the world feels smaller. Instead of taking days to cross the Atlantic by steamship, this was reduced to hours. 

Whereas a sail across the Atlantic was a major undertaking due to the time involved, the advent of air travel made it much more feasible to just “pick up and go”. 

In addition to air travel, the invention of the telephone revolutionized communications. What would have taken days, weeks, or even months, could now be talked about instantly.  Being able to pick up the phone to call a family member or colleague and to ask a question and to be able to get a response back in real-time is a very powerful ability.  Where telephone communications did not exist, perhaps two people located across the world were not able to communicate back and forth much more than a half dozen times. 

The Internet has taken this further and not only are we able to chat in real time, but we can share information. The proliferation of social networking – the Facebooks, the Twitters and all of the other social environments has opened up new doors at being able to share information with loved ones.

Case in point, the distance between Toronto, Canada and Sofia, Bulgaria is approximately 4,800 miles.  If one says for the sake of argument that it takes 2 seconds (an eternity in a digital age!) for data to transmit back and forth, that would work out to a “speed” of (if my math is right) of 8,400,00 MPH!  Heady stuff being able to talk to someone across the Atlantic at such breakneck speed!  What a wonderful way to be able to speak to a loved one who was born in the “middle of the last century”!

Along the same lines, business is starting to realize the benefit of this type of networking – of the ability to instantly communicate and share data with colleagues across the world.

Where instant messaging in the corporate world was once taboo, it is slowly becoming embraced by the big-wigs in the ivory tower as a way to increase productivity.

One tool becoming more common is Microsoft SharePoint. Think of SharePoint as being a “blank canvas” where companies can post content. Not only can files be posted in an easily accessible and secured area, but it lends itself quite well to collaboration. Instead of storing files locally on a LAN where others can update and maintain, SharePoint allows collaboration of these documents regardless of their geographic location.

Think back to my analogy of how before the advent of the telephone,  communications were restricted to how ever many letters could be ferried back and forth.

One of the beauties of SharePoint is as a blank canvas, it easily adapts itself to how the organization works.

As an example of this, I recently left a large financial services organization. Their implementation of SharePoint reflected their corporate culture. It was highly staged, regulated and was very methodical in nature. Not making any judgments on this – this is just the way they did business.  Contrast this to my new employer – a mid-size accounting firm that also has SharePoint. The corporate culture here is much different and it lends itself to empowering the various teams to design a SharePoint site that meets their individual needs.

The software development team here has some great sites on SharePoint for managing defects, request enhancements and for sharing information among the developer team.

This is not an article about what is a good and what is a bad SharePoint implementation. In both cases, SharePoint clearly reflects the corporate culture, and in my mind, it is one of the strengths of SharePoint and it is precisely this characteristic I think any tool should have.

The truly scary thing is I think the world will just continue to get smaller and smaller.  Will our children and grand-children scoff at our “primitive” 100mbps access?  Will they wonder how archaic our methods of communication were – and will they marvel at how we were actually able to get anything done.

The mind boggles.