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Our professor discussed something like the history of organizations, which can basically be divided into three categories: (1) Agricultural Age; (2) Industrial Age; (3) Information Age. Since we now have laptops, PDAs, instant messaging, the internet (information superhighway), and cellphones, I suppose we’ll all think that yeah, we are in the Information Age already. Funny thing is, the more I listened to what my professor was discussing, the more I think most of the companies in the Philippines are still in the Industrial Age, or worse, the Agricultural Age. Well, I guess you can’t really remove manual labor that easily because we still need people to operate the machines that are used to make the small components of the gadgets we are using now. But see, what’s even funnier is that I think most of the IT organizations are in the Industrial Age (I might even go so far as to think that some of them are in the Agricultural Age), not in the sense that they are technologically backwards, but more in the sense of how resources are treated within the organization. It’s not that people are working as if they’re in a mass production line. It’s more like, when brilliant people leave, the information that they brought into the company actually goes with them. I’m assuming this is probably one of the reasons why many solutions companies fold in just a couple of years. And while you do try to retain the information brought in by brilliant people, this information also becomes mass-produced. You can’t exactly have the same process over and over and over, especially when you’re dealing with information because everything evolves in the Information Age.