Office Yesterday
A few decades ago, a typical business Office presented a gloomy picture. Housed in one or two small rooms, poorly lighted and ill-ventilated, it was generally situated in the least conspicuous part of the building. There was a small volume of paperwork, which was handled by a few clerks manually and without the aid of mechanical and labour-saving devices. Since typewriters were somewhat rare, the clerks had to do all the written work with their own hands. Letters were copied before dispatch on loose sheets or in fat leather-bound registers. All the internal and external communication was performed or carried on through the human agency, for telephones and intercom systems were not generally in use. The proprietor of a business or the head clerk would be found sitting in the office room, supervising and guiding office work, and personally dealing with the visitors or customers. There was no departmentalization of office activities, and the techniques of scientific management were either not known or not practiced.
Historical Developments.
The following technological developments made during the last 150 years have led to the evolution of the modern office:
1870: First commercial typewriter introduced.
1880: Alexander Graham Bell invented telephone.
1920: Electric typewriter introduced.
1930: Important machines like duplicators, Dictaphones, intercoms developed.
1950: Calculators, computers, copying machines, addressographs, and franking, tabulating and accounting machines developed.
1961: Memory electronic typewriters launched.
1964: Word processing equipment, cash registers, etc.
1970: Introduction of digital networks local area networks (LAN).
1980: Computerized telephone networks, picture phone, etc.
1990: Personal computers, micro processing equipment, electronic mail, fax machines, modems, pagers, Cellular Phones, Internet Systems, etc.
2000: Internet Banking, Internet Trading, BPO servicing, Internet Telephony, Digitized office.
2008: Apple I-Phones, Voice Mails, Teleconferencing, Handwriting and speech Recognition Software, Broadband Spectrum, L.C.D. and Plasma T.V.s. 3D image Videoconferencing (telepresence), etc., Black Berry, Google Gphone, Robotics, etc.
2012: Voice/Face/Handwriting Recognition, 3D Printing, Apple iPhones 4S, ITB Hard Disk,
2014: Blue Ray Disc, Voice Navigation, Wi-fi, Wireless Printers, Cloud Computing (Google Drive, DropBox, Skydrive-Microsoft), iPad, Business Analytics (for Cash Management, Website Management, Employee Management, etc.) SaaS (Software as a Service), LED, Mobile Banking, Virtualization, Android, Ubuntu, Internet of Things (IOT), etc.
Office Today
Office activities have undergone vast changes in the last five-six decades. A modern office is well-planned, well-laid out and well-organized. The scope of office activities has widened tremendously following spectacular developments in science and technology, industrialization, transport and communication. These developments have led to an expansion in the scale of production and business activities, to greater governmental and legislative interference and control, and the consequent enlargement of the volume of office work. In today’s office, activities are performed not by general-purpose clerks but by specialized clerks- by receptionists, accounts clerks, cashiers, stenographers and typists. There is, thus, a greater division of labour. Loose-leaf binders have replaced the old fat leather-bound ledgers. Filing and indexing techniques have been developed. Departmentalization of office has been affected. Greater and wider use of machines (typewriters, dictaphones, calculators, accounting machines, computers, etc.) is made to save time and labour. Work standardization, job evaluation, merit rating and other techniques of personnel management are being practiced. Telephones, intercoms, telex and other communication device, are used for rapid and global communication. Many large-sized offices use computers to handle the enormous volume of work. The use of carbonless copy paper has become very popular.
In short, Offices today are organized on scientific principles, and their management and administration are in the hands of highly specialized managers. The term “Office Management” is rapidly being replaced by the term “Administrative Office Management” and “Information Management”
Office of the Future
Advancements in technology are having an enormous impact on the working of the office. The new office technologies are converting the information that was written or typed, transmitted and stored on paper to be processed by computer-based machines more accurately and at much higher speed. However, it may be stressed that the rate of introduction of the new technology is very 'variable' and it might take many years before all offices resemble ‘office of the future’. In India, we usually find a mixture of traditional and new machines in the same office. Few organizations have the finance or are prepared to take the risk of replacing all their old office equipment with the new machines all at once. We are, in fact, in a period of transition which might extend to a few years or even more. In the more distant future, we might see an office that is virtually 'paperless'. However, in the near future, there will be an important reduction rather than a total abolition of paperwork.
The office of the future has to face a variety of challenges — social, political and economic. For instance, with the increased mechanization of office activities and the installation of sophisticated machines like computers, it seems we are on the threshold of office automation. With the increasing pace of industrialization and government control of the business, the need to employ more experts and specialists to perform office activities has become pressing, and has led to the utilization of consultancy services to a greater extent. These developments call for a greater “professionalization of management” and increased application of the principles of management to the office. The other challenges faced by the office of the future include:
• The challenge of legal provisions.
• The challenge of reducing paperwork.
• The challenge of reducing office cost.
Once these challenges are met, the productivity of an office would increase, and its importance would be enhanced in relation to the business organization of the future.