This past week, I was in the Bay Area on Business. Watching the local news, within the same broadcast, they were talking about Virgin Megastores closing in San Francisco, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper struggling to stay alive. I couldn’t help but think about these are signs of not only a recession, but the final death throes of the old media.

We have reached the end of the Industrial Era and are well into the Information Era. In the Industrial Era, information didn’t happen in real time. In fact, it didn’t need to. There were no computers, email, Twitter, or Youtube. People hand prepared documents, mailed them, spent time reading the newspaper, and did things that were generally done over the period of hours, days, and weeks. Things were much slower then, but the culture did not demand the urgency of information that it does today.

Today, we get our news online, as we want, when we want it. We no longer prepare documents, we send PDFs via email. We instant message our peers for information who happen to be on the other side of the nation or even the world.

I always drive home the point that in Enterprise Software, it is an imperative that you must drive data to the source. In other words, you must put the origination of data right at the source. In a business sense, this means that you must put the key strokes or data collection right at the point in the process where the entry originates, such as at a quality check point on the shop floor, or with the employee for HR information.

In the bigger world, this is already happening with the coined term of “On-Demand”. Virgin is suffering due to iTunes. The consumers are directly sourcing the media. If you look at CNN’s iReport, you will see that news events are being reported by those closest to the news; usually people directly involved. People are Twittering about the airline crash that they are actually in! Talk about driving data to the source! And all of this information is being consumed by people who have a direct interest from anywhere in the world in real-time.

On the newscast, there was a pundit speaking about the death of the newspapers and how this is going to put traditional investigative reporters out of work. This is probably true, but many of these reporters are turning to new media reporting. I’m not in the journalistic world, but I would imagine that blogging, and independent reporting is becoming more the standard.

I work from home and “telecommute” (although this is a inaccurate word). I work with clients directly all over the world via web conferences, setting up systems and training them how to use these new tools. I imagine that the traditional workforce is slowly moving away from a centralized office and instead to independent teams of people who work independently from wherever they happen to be. No longer are we bound to the concepts of an Industrial model, rather we are free to explore our independent contributions to our “companies”, “teams” or other organizational system. We are moving to a world where the data is at the source.

I welcome your comments on this.

Era, Information, internet, technology