Tech"no"logy?

(The background behind this post lies heavily in a Management of Technical Organization lecture I attended this week. It was about how being in a technical organization can affect the management. Managing an IT company today is totally different from managing any other Technical company that focuses on physical outputs.)

1. What is technology?

2. Can it be 'defined'?

The answer to both those questions are very ambiguous. My answer to them is that Technology is change. Something, anything that is different.

There are people out there who criticize the premise of companies like Facebook, Twitter or even job hunt websites like Monster. How can they be termed technology companies when they don't have a sound infrastructure backing. Their argument being that tomorrow if Airbus were to go bust, they would have the financial authority to save themselves by selling their assets. Assets that are physical quantities. That are measurable. How would you recover money if a website valued at XYZ billion dollars suddenly collapses? They have nothing that can be termed a liquid asset. Facebook has 3200 employees answerable to 100 billion dollars of valuation! Compare that to 170000 people for a 56 billion company - Boeing. Is it a bubble that can burst tomorrow? I think not.

What makes companies like these successful is the Idea, the Idea of something different. It makes them a technology. Facebook has acquired cult status. But what makes it so different is the amount of information it has. It has managed to do what no one else could, it makes information sharing 'Cool' and essential at the same time. No single enterprise has had so much information about people ever before. In the economic sense, technology can be anything that will lead to an objective. The objective may or may not be tangible. It can be money, happiness or innovation. Emphasis is change again.

However the drawback of an IT company is the environment in which it functions. They seem to dig their own grave. Lenin once said that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang yourself. Its an exaggeration of a basic idea, can you keep up with your progress? The IT world is changing at a pace that is hard to keep up with, even by the companies involved in the trade. Management of such organizations cannot be on par with something like Boeing or GE. They cannot function in bureaucracy. The rules and limitations of it will act as barriers and not guidelines.

Change is good. Change is needed. Facebook updates its features every few months or so. It might be annoying to get friendly with them initially but thats what makes it tick. And it completes the circle by coming back to the same point.

Technology is change. Change that is good.

This post critiques some ideas and is an abstraction from this article from The Economist.