The article Measuring the impacts of digital disruption: Introducing Gartner’s digital disruption scale (Plummer 2017, 2018, 2023) includes a digital disruption scale chart where it compares the effect that different events throughout history have had worldwide, both socially, economically, and technologically.

The part that I find striking about the chart is how the second world war and the industrial revolution, events that happened two and three centuries ago, had radical impacts on the life and behavior of people in the world. Sad but true, wars also involve technological developments, in this case, comparable to the effect of the cloud and smartphones. On the one hand, the world war developed in a short period of six years, having significant advances such as Turing’s Enigma codes and Lamarr and Antheil’s so-frequency communication system. The first can be understood as the precursor of modern computing, without which today we would not have the information systems we have today, and the second is the basis for GPS and WIFi.

Source: Gartner (April 2018)

The articles mentioned above show that the impact of events cannot always be quantified at the time and that “One company’s innovation is another company’s disruption.” It is a butterfly effect. Inventions that sometimes come out to satisfy a need can become an unstoppable engine of change within our society.

References

Daryl Plummer, David Smith. Gartner (2017, May 17). Measuring the impacts of digital disruption: Introducing Gartner’s Digital Disruption Scale.

David Smith, Daryl Plummer. Gartner (2019, Aprril 11).Measuring the Impacts of Digital Disruption: Populating Gartner’s Digital Disruption Scale