When we started our firm, there were no home computers. In fact, we thought we were pretty progressive with our IBM Memory Selectric typewriter, which we traded in for a TI 99/4 A in 1981. Our first Mac came a year or so later (followed by several dark and regrettable years of using PC’s, necessary then for client compatability, before thankfully switching back to Apple a few years ago).

All of this is to say that by the mid-80’s, the debate over main frame vs. distributed computing had begun to blossom. We had been doing a lot of Organizational Development work for the University of Western Ontario, and I had a good, long-term thing going with their IT folks. I was asked in 1986 to lead that university’s faculty and administrative executives through some extensive, research-driven visioning of the future … it appeared these damn personal computers might just stick around, and they might eventually impact the way people accessed their learning and research information. Who knew?

This opened up a whole new line of action for our firm, and we went on to spend several years supporting organizational and policy change at two major universities and a wide range of other public and private sector organizations. Much of this work was driven by the so-called ‘third wave’ … the gradual introduction of the information age, followed soon by the internet and then the world wide web, with its massive implications for the way major organizations, and the people who worked for them, would do business in the future.

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