In many ways, this election was a testament to the impact of the information technology. We are in a kind of "second age" of information technology--it isn't maturing, it has matured.
Social-media apps like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, realtime video chat, broadband connections, web-2.0 mashups, and rich community websites (e.g. barackobama.com) have come together in an unprecedented way to bear witness to history in the making.
I take home a couple of lessons from this.
First, the internets have grown up for sure and we now live in a post-connected world. If you aren't on the web and IN the web, you better re-evaluate the way you do business. And I don't mean having marketing-websites, flash-driven glossy brochures. I mean having an authentic presence that combines user participation and openness. The new "think" is "open". If traditional marketing was about putting lipstick on pigs, we are officially post-lipstick and all pig.
Yet, even as these public-facing apps are the symptom of the change, there is something deeper going on. WaPo's article nails it squarely with this note:
Jon Carson, a brainy, 33-year-old field director, developed sophisticated databases to chart developments -- the number of hits the campaign's Florida Web page got in a single day, for example, or the number of people nationwide who had downloaded voter-registration forms. Such unprecedented technology would later give the campaign confidence that its strength in Republican-leaning states was not a mirage.
The second lesson, and perhaps the more important one, is this. If your business or school isn't driven by data, you officially belong to generation-ex. My expertise is in database technology for schools so this hits close to home.
Make no mistake, if your database was just about tracking stuff and printing letters, think again. If there were any doubt the business of this new era is hinged on the strategic use of realtime information, this election has more than amply made the argument to think differently.
Admissions offices in particular take note. Is your database just tracking 'stuff'?
... and government take note
... if your public schools are not funded for (1) dedicated admissions personnel, (2) keeping technology upgraded, (3) supporting schools with in-house IT staff, and (4) ongoing staff development so staff even knows how to put all that good tech to use .... what does this say about the commitment to raising an educated and 21st-century crop of students?
In NYC schools we have none of the above. In my daughter's NYC high school:
There is one admissions person who doubles as a tech lab teacher and also as an advisor, who has to wade through over 10,000 applications a year for 125 available seats.
There are zero onsite tech personnel, and slow or nonexistent support from the Dept. of Ed when tech support is needed.
It's alarming how many of the staff members, *even the incoming young ones*, know *so little* about how to apply technology around their core curriculum. Some cannot even open email attachments ...
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