Organizations have been trying to standardize parts, processes, procedures and even people ever since Henry Ford created the assembly line.
The benefits of this effort have been an ever-increasing level of worker productivity that has actually accelerated in the past 20-plus years thanks to the advent of personal computers, local area networks, and the Internet.
The reason that this has played out so consistently is that the less time we waste worrying about repetitive activities, the more time we can allocate to higher value activities like solving complex problems or having meaningful communication with our coworkers.
Cloud computing offers the opportunity to take standardization to the next logical level, and that means reorganizing the corporate schema or data model. Read more
Whatever trends are emerging, fading or in full swing, there are more than enough experts to declare, debunk or deny their existence. The fun part is not necessarily wading through all the contradicting opinions to select the one that represents the closest thing to reality, but waiting 12 months or so and watching them all say they were correct in how things actually turned out.
