Thriving on Change: Model for Success in the 1990s

The Information Age is upon us. What seemingly just yesterday was a passion—or at the very least a search for excellence in business management—has suddenly become the ability to “thrive on chaos.” New events and advances in technology are occurring so fast in today's high‐tech society that our only hope of coping with this rapid change is to define it as the norm. Like the theory of relativity, where there are two frames of reference—one stationary and the other moving in time—the successful surveying engineering firm of the 1990s will require a business management strategy that is both stable and dynamic, accommodating new technologies as they are made available to even the smallest of firms. What has taken more than 4,000 years to evolve is now being so radically changed in less than a decade that surveying firms that prospered in the 1980s may not be able to survive in the 1990s, to say nothing of the 21st century. This paper will investigate the forces surrounding today's surveying engineering firms, and present a model for successfully implementing a business management strategy that will enable small to medium‐sized firms to move from managing the manual surveying technicians of the past to the automated land information specialists of the future.