Finding your footing in the world of business used to be all about your particular skills, or those of your team and your co-workers and employees. Now this is all still valid, but there’s an added pressure from clients and business partners to make everything smooth, fast and streamlined.

This tendency, of course, is a reflection of the world we live in. The information age is here to stay and with it come new challenges for the workspace. Nowadays people, both customers and other companies, are used to living a world where everything happens fast and everything is customizable while still being easily recognizable. We used to say that Radio changed the world and brought the different countries together. People could then receive their news live and not have to wait for the next day’s newspaper. Then it was the age of Television, which added image, and later color, to the world of radio. The planet we live in was getting smaller and smaller, as not things that we could only read about could be experienced through the screen. Just then, the face of business was changing. Perhaps as a result of the dawn of the information age business transactions started happening faster. There was no more room for long decisions and lengthy waiting periods, and the conference call meetings became a serious factor in conducting business.

But the biggest change of all came with the advent of computers and high speed internet. With computers, storage space of information became immense and incredibly reliable. We’ve all seen the articles explaining how an entire storage facility for, let’s say, a lawyer firm can be fitted into a single hard drive, or even maybe a single CD-Rom. This, of course, led to different problems for which adequate solutions had to be found. The world of IT management and of technical support is now a thriving industry but, at first, it fumbled and had immense difficulty getting off the ground due to the lack of specialized personnel. Nowadays it’s a little hard to think how people dealt without computers and without the people fixing their computers, but there was such a time. The traditional teleconference also became a thing of the past, since nowadays all conference calls are done over a high speed internet connection and have the people that aren’t in the room on screen, creating what can be considered a virtual meeting space.