WSTA West Sound Technology Association

Tech: The Way Up?

March 12, 2010 - As president of WSTA and a long term technology provider in my own consulting business, I have seen changes caused by technology and its increasing importance in our lives and economy. PCs grew from hobbyist experiments to rival the power of mainframes of the not too distant past. With improvements in processing, storage, networking and interfaces, the power of yesterday’s supercomputers (and tomorrow’s) now sits in our hands. Books, CDs and DVDs are yielding to their electronic versions. Physician and law offices, long bastions of paper, are shifting to electronic records. Libraries are increasingly focused on providing public internet access and not just books and print collections.

Change is everywhere, and yet oddly, not always where it needs to be. My daughter, now in kindergarten, was logging in and driving her PC when in pre-school, even as she was still learning to spell. Hopefully she will never have to lug around a pile of school books which would become outdated next year. Singapore was switching over three years ago. Technology can also be very good for the environment - if we move more bits and bytes and fewer cars, trucks and paper. It holds the promise to transform healthcare, hopefully before we run out of money to pay for it.

As our lives become more interconnected, with the good comes the bad - with threats from potentially anywhere. Few can afford to do everything ‘offline’, and for some things it may become the only option, so we all need to become more security aware. The Kenber botnet, uncovered just a few weeks ago, was smallish, infecting some 75,000 PCs in 2,500 organizations (Conflicker infected millions). But it was depth and stealth that mattered; collecting vast quantities of data, building profiles on users with email addresses, passwords, financial and other information. The bad guys are getting better. Let’s get a step ahead of them.

Other tech changes make a big splash, but it’s not yet obvious what they will yield. Is social networking set to transform marketing, or on the same path banner ads and untargeted broadcast emails took years before? MySpace exploded in popularity, then became passé as Facebook and Twitter emerged to claim top dog status. If too dominated by flash over substance, will these also give way to newer options? The experiment is definitely on.

WSTA as an organization is here to promote technology which betters our lives, our members, and region. In addition, we provide a peer-to-peer best practise niche not filled by other entities in the West Sound. Our role seems obvious, yet undercurrents are taking us in different directions. With the economic downturn has come a retrenchment , and the need to partner and coordinate efforts is more critical than ever.

The ubiquitous nature of technology is deceiving, and can lead to complacency or burnout. WSTA’s work is not done: technology change is accelerating and transforming our lives like never before. Access to electronic resources has greatly improved, yet our in-person meetings remain vital to building business to customer and business to business connections.

Does technology play a leading role in creating more stress in our increasingly more complex lives? Maybe, but casting off technology for simpler living isn’t the solution. Technology has created the environment to support both vastly more productive work and personal choices that would not exist without it. Our standard of living, efforts towards a cleaner environment, less use of resources, better information and choices -- are all supported by continually embrace new technologies towards these ends.