Hello again, I’m going to write about some of the major
forces that Thomas L. Friedman covers in his book “The World is Flat. These forces
play very important roles in flattening the world.
I’m going to start with
workflow software. Workflow software is software designed to assist with the
completion of a specific task. Typically tasks that require multiple steps and
people involved. The way I see it, workflow software is just a digital assembly
line and a perfect example of that assembly line is the student loan industry.
I have actually worked for a student loan company for the last year. Workflow
software has allowed the process of applying for a loan quick and painless (If
approved of course) by allowing students to apply for the loan online digitally
and get results in a matter of seconds. This is all possible through workflow
software. Once Submit, the application is run through an initial check that
verifies the applicant’s identity. The next step requests information from one
of the three credit reporting agencies. If the credit information meets our
requirements the student will then receive their results, pass or fail. If
approved, the remaining steps can be completed online as well through our
electronic signing process. That process asks the applicant a series of
security questions to verify identity further more than allows them to agree to
their terms. Even the process of sending the funding to the students school is
done digitally. As you can imagine, the whole process would take weeks of
mailing documents back and forth to even know if you’re approved for the loan.
With workflow software, the whole process from start to finish can be done
without even leaving the computer chair. This has allowed the company to handle
many more accounts all over the country in a timely manner.
Next in line is open-source
software. Open-source software is simply just software that is provided freely
along with the original source code. What this allowed was the ability for
programmers all over the world to develop high quality software by building and
refining each other’s work and provide it to the world for free. Open-source
software plays an important role in flattening the world because it takes the
power out of the big name software developer’s hands and gives it to the community.
The growth of open-source software forced companies to support and better their
product so that they would have a reason for people to purchase it.
The last flattening force I will
discuss today is outsourcing. Outsourcing is the process in which an
organization will take a local task and have it completed in a more cost efficient
location. Outsourcing is very big with call centers as calls can be digitally
relayed to another country and handled by employees at a much lower pay grade
then employees in the United States. It plays an important role as it greatly
improves a company’s profits and provides people from less fortunate parts of
the world with a job. I personally was not a big fan of outsourcing because of
my experiences of poor customer service in the past. But the customer service
has grown quite a bit over the years and I have realized that outsourcing is a
very effective business strategy.
The more I read this book,
the more I realize just how unaware we are about the amount of change that has
happened over the last few years. Technology is growing at an extreme rate and
it’s only going to make life easier and the world a better place to live.
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