As always I try to understand what drives success and failure in procedures within organisations in the hope that it may allow me to understand where and when I should make effort to really make a difference in driving development. I wanted to take a step back and look more widely at transformation and see if there was a structure that might be generally applicable and I think there is. The journey from ancient record-keeping to modern cloud architectures follows a pattern that feels less like conscious strategy and more like a tech tree.
Civilisations don’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s invent databases.” They solved immediate problems using the tools available, and each solution quietly unlocks the prerequisites for the next. Over time, those incremental steps formed a path that looks strangely inevitable in hindsight. Importantly within organisations sections or individuals can be on a different level of this path as well. That is a useful observation as by understanding the evolution and understanding where someone is on it there is an obvious and natural strategy to move forward.
I’ve come to realise that a lot of projects fail because individuals are not aware of the path, don’t know where they are on that path and don’t realise that you cannot jump stages you need to go through each stage before you can jump to a later more appealing stage. I see this a lot with web GIS when it is introduced without proper links to databases.
Today, when organisations move from paper files to digital documents to web-accessible databases, they’re not just modernising — they’re following the same branching evolutionary path that started with clay tablets in Mesopotamia.
as follows
🪵 Tier 1: Physical Records — The Dawn of Organisational Memory
Unlocks:
Information persistence
Standardised transactions
The first administrative systems
Nodes:
Clay or wooden tablets — ledger entries, grain tallies, tax receipts
Papyrus, parchment, early paper — lighter, portable, more space-efficient
Bound volumes and filing cabinets — organisation at scale
This tier is about capturing information. Most early organisations — temples, city-states, guilds — stored what mattered where it physically happened.
But physical media has predictable constraints:
hard to duplicate
easy to lose
slow to search
geographically fixed
These constraints create pressure for the next unlock.
📄 Tier 2: Industrial Paper Systems — Bureaucracy as Technology
Unlocks:
Large-scale administration
Mass literacy in record-keeping
Distributed offices
Nodes:
Carbon copies
Central registries
Off-site storage
Standardised forms
Once institutions scaled (banks, insurance, public authorities), paper became its own ecosystem. Entire professions grew around organising it.
But again, friction accumulates:
duplication becomes expensive
audit trails get messy
collaboration is slow
throughput bottlenecks emerge
The solution wasn’t digitisation yet — it was mechanisation: punch cards, microfilm, early typewriting pools. These were transitional “minor techs” that set the stage for the next leap.
💾 Tier 3: Digital Files — Information Without Geography
Unlocks:
Immortality of Data
Speed
Duplication
Storage
Basic automation
Nodes:
Word documents
Spreadsheets
Local drives
Network folders
Email attachments
This tier feels modern because it still dominates everyday work. But digital files mainly replicate paper’s logic:
Individual documents
Manual version control
Human-based workflows
Shared drives acting like filing cabinets
It’s the same mental model — just running faster.
Still, once organisations reach a certain size, digital files reveal their limits:
Who has the latest version?
Where do we store the truth?
Why is this data locked in 400 spreadsheets?
These questions unlock the next tier.
🗄️ Tier 4: Databases — Structured Truth
Unlocks:
Querying
Consistency
Multi-user access
Transactional integrity
Nodes:
Relational databases
Normalised schemas
Application logic
ETL pipelines
Enterprise data warehouses
The database tier represents the moment information stops being “documents” and becomes structured knowledge.
Instead of stacks of files, you get:
tables
relations
indexing
constraints
automated integrity rules
Once you hit this level, the organisation’s memory becomes machine-readable instead of human-readable.
And that unlocks the next big thing.
🌐 Tier 5: Databases With Web Access — Web Accessible Structured Truth
Unlocks:
Global reach
Real-time collaboration
APIs as connective tissue
Dashboards and analytics
Workflow automation
Nodes:
Web front-ends
Cloud hosting
REST APIs
Identity & access management
Cross-department systems
GIS integration (my favourite!)
This is where most modern digital transformation efforts sit:
Moving from “a database in a room” to “a platform accessible anywhere.”
This tier changes more than technology — it changes how organisations behave:
teams collaborate in real time
processes become measurable
systems integrate across old boundaries
organisational intelligence compounds
It’s the first point where the system becomes alive.
🌱 The Tech Tree is Emergent — But It’s Also Inevitable
The big takeaway is this:
Organisations don’t skip tiers.
You can’t go from papyrus to APIs without unlocking the intermediate techs (literacy, filing systems, computing, data modelling).
And once a tier is unlocked, organisations feel the tension that pushes them toward the next:
paper creates filing problems
digital files create versioning problems
databases create accessibility problems
web databases create integration problems
integration creates analysis problems
Every stage solves the previous stage’s bottleneck while generating new ones that only future tiers can handle.
That’s why digital transformation often feels both chaotic and inevitable.
It’s not just technology — it’s organisational evolution.
🧠 The Hidden Lesson
If you understand your organisation’s place on this tech tree, you can predict:
what problems you’re supposed to be having
what capabilities you’re ready to unlock
what investments will compound rather than stall
Digital transformation works best when you recognise it as the next natural step in a centuries-long lineage of humans trying to remember things better.
We’re still following the same path the Sumerians started — we’re just moving much faster.