The Rise of IT

The History of Modern Organizations — PART V.

People have been working since the dawn of our time. Whether it was hunting or gathering, farming or nursing, warring, or leading, work has always been there. But, work has changed over time. With the discovery of fire, the creation of tools, and the ever-increasing complexities of our human societies, labor has evolved for most humans.

Understanding the Why

If we would focus solely on today’s modern workplace — the one you are probably familiar with — we would be missing out on why things came to be as they currently are. To better understand the current, it definitely helps to understand the past. Thus, a brief dive into history, similar to the previous articles about psychology, will aid in comprehending psychological insights into the way things happen in your work environment today.

Let me be frank about the scope of this all-too-brief overview of the history of work. No doubt I will be skipping numerous significant influential persons as well as events, but these articles are not intended as an all-encompassing encyclopedia of sorts. I will touch on topics that I see as highly influential still to this day, and therefore important to understand.

Information Technology

In these last few articles, there was a heavy focus on management, but not so much on the technical details of what is produced with a project. I find it important to touch on those aspects as well since some of the more technical paths of thinking accord with the project management way of thinking and are thus essential to understanding the psychology of today’s work environment in most organizations, especially since the rise of the importance of information technology overall.

Function Point Analysis

In 1979, Allan Albrecht of IBM introduced Function Point analysis. The Function Point is a unit of measurement to express the amount of business functionality an information system, as a product, provides to an end-user.

Function points are used to compute a Functional Size Measurement of software. The costs, in money or hours, of a single unit, are based on experience from past projects. The functional user…