I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all.
Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit.
This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well.
Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application.
I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.
Yes, people worrying about AI when the gain from computers still isn't really here yet.
In Europe, there is still a massive reluctance to hire programmers. So most large corporates/governments are buying from Oracle or SAP, get in an Indian contractor to implement, it inevitably goes wrong, and then they say how unreasonably expensive it all is...and it would be even more expensive if they hired onshore.
And then you talk to the person who is managing the contract for the purchaser...struggles with Excel, struggles with basic tasks in Windows...I am sure this happens in the US too btw, but it is just unreasonably extreme in Europe. The dominance of SAP in particular is an indication that something is very wrong with enterprise software.
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I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all.
Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit.
This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well.
Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application.
I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.
Yes, people worrying about AI when the gain from computers still isn't really here yet.
In Europe, there is still a massive reluctance to hire programmers. So most large corporates/governments are buying from Oracle or SAP, get in an Indian contractor to implement, it inevitably goes wrong, and then they say how unreasonably expensive it all is...and it would be even more expensive if they hired onshore.
And then you talk to the person who is managing the contract for the purchaser...struggles with Excel, struggles with basic tasks in Windows...I am sure this happens in the US too btw, but it is just unreasonably extreme in Europe. The dominance of SAP in particular is an indication that something is very wrong with enterprise software.