Quick Redundancy Checklist (October 2020)
The year is 2020 and marks the beginning of another decade. We can all agree that we are not starting this decade on a good note with the pandemic, but we can all hope that it will only get better from now onwards. The start of this decade coincided with a very rare tragic event of a world pandemic, but does not necessarily mean we are cursed for the rest of it, in fact, this decade might be what I would predict to be the peak of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4.0), which started a bit more earlier than the time we find ourselves in. 4.0 is at this point very nascent and I am convinced there is a lot more to be done before we have exhausted all that is meant to happen in this revolution. Well, in order to understand the direction we are headed into and the enormous change that is about to come, one must understand their present circumstances and assess if they are on the right track in order to ensure they are not left behind. Here I present three simple examples of the present circumstances and how I believe will change once we conclude 4.0 and humanity continues with another revolution, who knows, by then, we will be visiting our great grandchildren in a Galaxy somewhere in the Universe.
1. Emails for Business to Business Communications
Most communications between businesses is still primarily via email. In the age where Cloud computing is making a solid foundation, email for business to business as a main communication method is becoming entirely redundant. Let me put this to perspective, before emails, we used letters and Post offices for such communications that required exchanging of documents between businesses right. In an ordinary set up back then, a business will first write and send a letter to another business to check the availability of certain goods and make clear intentions of ordering such goods. After sending the letter, most probably will have to wait for a month to receive a reply back from the supplier business that the goods are available, and an order has been placed. Depending on the agreement in place between the two businesses, the one business will then write a Cheque to the supplier business, post it again, wait another month or two before receiving the final goods.
Writing emails is pretty much the same process but just a lot faster. One business will send an email and wait for a few hours or a day or two (in a worst case scenario) before the email is responded to and then proceed to make payment before receiving the final goods.
In the age of Cloud computing, sending emails becomes very redundant. Businesses can instead set up hybrid clouds for communication with each other. Let’s assume two businesses that have to constantly exchange legal documents to do business. Writing emails to send the required documents back and forth can simply be reduced into a cloud storage where each party can have a secure access and instead of sending the documents back and forth, upload or make the necessary changes to the documents on that hybrid cloud. The process will be much faster and quicker than sending an email and waiting for it to be responded to. There are disadvantages or risk associated with any new processes, but online security should not be one of them, especially with different more secure protocols becoming industry standards, such as multi-factor authentications. There are more and more providers that are starting to blossom offering different cloud computing solutions from Infrastructure as a Service to Software as a Service and these healthy dose of competition in the industry has the potential of reducing the costs associated with cloud computing significantly in the long run.
2. “Cash or Card?”, “It will be Cheque please”
Cheques, believe it or not, were still being accepted by some banks in South Africa as means of payment. Its 2020 and I have never personally seen a Cheque before. It seems that they are still being used by a very small number of the population. Two of the largest four banks in the country announced that they will no longer accept cheque payments from 2021.
While cheque are seeing the demise right at the beginning of this decade, Cash and possibly Bank Cards will meet their demise at some point during 4.0. From my observations, it seems like Bank Cards might be the first to be redundant compared to Cash. Mastercard and Visa have made it necessary for everyone opening a bank account to have a bank card with them, but this could possibly eventually change. As a matter of fact, one does not really need a bank card. There are some numerous interesting fintech start-ups that are developing more secure ways of making payments, whether physically or online, without the need of a bank card. The financial industry is heavily regulated and has to be so in order to be prudential, but the pace of innovation, despite being constrained by the level of regulation in the industry, will make Bank cards as dispensable as Cheques have come to be.
3. Paper-Based Forms
As more and more businesses invest heavily on interactive websites and mobile applications, it’s becoming a lot more expensive to accept and maintain business processes that use paper-based forms. For instance, let’s assume you are submitting an application for a new bank account, all those documents you have to print, complete, scan and send back to the bank is a long process that can be reduced by a few clicks and navigation on a website. Most business and not just banks still accept paper-based forms as a business process but this way of doing business will reduce significantly during 4.0 and might be completely eliminated if we achieve some form of complete global internet coverage where everyone has easy access to the internet.
This quick checklist is by no means an exhaustion of things that will change during the 4th Industrial Revolution, and a lot of things have already started to change. This was just from my observations based on my experience so far as a student and a young professional. The future is definitely exciting, and we all have to reimagine what it will look like and how we are going to fit in.
