DIGI SOCIETY
Digitalization has had a huge impact on both my work and personal life over the past ten years. I just realized that twelve years ago, I didn’t even have a smartphone!
The work culture has changed dramatically, especially during COVID. However, when I started working in the offices in my early twenties, I had my own desk in an open office, a computer, and a work phone that stayed at the office at the end of each day. My work phone was some old Nokia, so I could only make calls with it.
When I switched jobs from retail to an IT company, occasional remote work from home became possible as long as I planned my day’s tasks carefully in advance – I didn’t have access to all the information from home.
In my current job, my most important tools are my iPhone and laptop. My work is not location-dependent because the programs I use and all the necessary information are in cloud services, and I can get internet access shared from my phone anywhere. With my phone, I can log into ERP and CRM systems, use Teams smoothly, and easily respond to my emails. Working is much more agile and efficient than it was even just a few years ago.
With system integrations, automation, and AI, my administrative tasks now run faster, and the number of errors has decreased. I can easily run various reports and gather data from my work in seconds, whereas before I collected information from several different places manually.
As a risk in development, I see that not everyone can keep up with the rapid pace; I’m not very technically skilled myself, so sometimes continuous learning and digesting information feels difficult. I’ve also noticed that I sometimes rely too much on automation: I don’t always remember to check reports carefully, so sometimes there are significant errors in reporting due to some very insignificant mistake. If I had created them manually, I would have been able to question the result and correct the error. At least for now, our system doesn’t do this for me.
I feel that GDPR has brought a lot of good, such as emphasizing individual rights and increasing transparency. However, it has also brought a tremendous amount of responsibility and costs to companies, and at least in my work, it has slowed down processing as I have to be particularly careful when handling sensitive data.
ChatGPT
I work with change management services and asked the AI to explain what change management is. ChatGPT was able to respond well to the topic, but it couldn’t filter out information: I also received a lot of information that is related to the topic but is not part of those specific services.
In my experience, artificial intelligence is a useful tool for summarizing data, articulating thoughts, and discussing a topic you already have some knowledge of. It’s important to question information and understand that not everything provided necessarily relates directly to the given topic.
Self evaluation
It was fun to reflect on the past years in the working life and thought about the big changes I’ve personally experienced and lived through. I’ve done similar tasks before, and often I find myself listing the coolest new things, without even considering the impact that good tools alone have had on how work is done.
Several fellow students had been considering the security of sending emails. It has been familiar to me in my work for the past few years, so it was funny to notice that although I’m usually a bit behind on these things, this “issue” became part of my daily life pretty much immediately after the GDPR changes, as I handle sensitive information diligently towards the authorities on a daily basis.
Blogs I commented
`s site, but commenting wasn`t allowed:“This task turned out to be really interesting. It has been great to read about other students’ experiences with digitalization in their work tasks. You work in an important field, and it’s fantastic to hear that your work has also become easier and the quality has improved as various functions have evolved.”
07/07/2024 at 19:03
Thanks for the interesting blog. In my own work, digitalization has also developed a lot. At the beginning of my career, only landline phones were used, all calls came to this and the phone was answered by the person at my workplace who had time to answer it at that moment :D. The Covid era accelerated the change, when remote receptions became familiar in my own work.
You told that working is much more agile and efficient than before. Personally, I feel that efficiency in my own work has been increased by, for example, the fact that meetings are no longer held regularly on site. Some meetings were long distances away, and an hour-long meeting could take more than three hours. Of course, some meetings still make more sense to be physically present.
I agree with you that not everyone keeps up with the pace of development so well. In the future, attention should be paid to what measures we should take, so that those who do not learn new digital skills so well are not burdened too much by rapid development.