Module 2, The World is Flat

Module 2.

 

         Reading further in “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman introduces some of the key components to the success of the World Wide Web and examines how the advantages of flattening the world has helped not only our national economy, but the economy of the whole world flourish.

          First was the creation of workflow software.  This software allowed companies and individuals to take advantage of what the PC and the World Wide Web had to offer in business.  Everyone in a company can communicate and collaborate with each other through their PC’s electronically.  From my experience in the Air Force, I can give you a personal example of how workflow software helped my flight out a great deal.  If you wanted to get gas for your government vehicle on base, you needed to use what was called a VIL (vehicle identification link) key.  My job was to keep track of these keys and issue them to new vehicles.  If you had a new vehicle that needed a VIL key you had to physically come to our office, fill out a form, bring that form back to your office and get all the signatures needed for approval. Finally, you had to bring that form back to us so we could issue you a key.  By being able to digitize this form you could simply request us to email you the form, which you could then email to all the approving officials for their electronic signature, and then Email it back to us for approval.  This reduced the average time to get a VIL key from about 3 days to less than one hour. A great example of how workflow software can aid a business.

         A stepping-stone in the development of the Web and its popularity today was the use of open source web servers.  Open source, or community developed software, allowed anyone around the world to access an original source code of software and modify and improve its content.  This allowed for total effectiveness of creating a product.  The large companies no longer had all the say in developing software.  People from all around the world could work together and contribute individually to develop the best product possible, and release it for free.  I think this opened the door for software development to reach the level of quality it is at today at a much faster rate. The creation of Apache through individual collaboration on the World Wide Web is a great example of the empowerment that open source software provides. Without community developed software, I think it’s very likely that we would have had to pay a premium just to download a quality web browser to browse the web.

    One of the greatest additions to the world from the Web is Outsourcing.  Outsourcing is the ability to take a business process and ship it electronically to a foreign country where it could be done at the same quality for a lot less.  The introduction of the fiber optic cables and the World Wide Web made outsourcing possible.  I think outsourcing has proven to be the greatest product of the Web and has helped our global economy flourish.  Although this has almost certainly reduced a lot of jobs in the United States, it has greatly improved the economies of other countries and the global economy as a whole.  Businesses here in the U.S. recognize the value of outsourcing and the advantages of it to obtain maximum profitability.  Because of this, I think we must take a closer look at our career choices to determine if our own careers can be affected by outsourcing in the future.

   
          I think this section of reading takes a closer look at how the world became globalized through

technology. Today, most of the world's economy occurs in electronic form.   We can connect to

anyone anywhere in the world and work together on any kind of project.  Being able to collaborate

with anyone digitally creates endless possibilities in business, or anything else for that matter.