Introduction
Internet is a technology that provides global network and has become an unavoidable concept in the last few years. This technology which started as a basic tool within military, government & university operations has exploded into a world class communication medium and has become the backbone for organisations. Businesses are exploiting this technology on a large scale and implementing it widely in all their functional processes (Aguiar & Oliveira, nd). In this report we touch base on the aspects of gaining competitive advantage, limitation and management issues relating to the technology of internet. The information has been gathered through search on various websites and AUT library database and all citations have been referenced appropriately.
Management or Implementation Issues
Major management issue for most organisations is to understand the percentage of assistance required from Internet technology. Management needs to understand the structure of the organization, nature of the business, employee skills and customer database. Alignment should be based on company goal and future requirements rather than generic reasons (Schwartz, 2008). Closely associated to the alignment problem is the issue of organisational culture. Considerations have to be made on how the culture of the company can be managed with the ever-rising technology of the Internet. Technology is moving at a rapid pace but it is important for the staff to understand the relationship between the use of advanced technology and organisational benefits. Management need to have a clear understanding of organisational goals, value and business plan to all stakeholders. Implementation and sophistication in one office is difficult to be transferred across national borders due to cultural implications (Haynes, 2002). Staff training is also a management issue due to the rapid development of new technologies over the Internet. Another major issue for management is the loss of personal relationships. Lack of human touch may not allow the employees and customers to develop a rapport that may erode emotional attachment. Research indicates customers are loyal and perceive less risk in a face-to-face interaction as compared to interacting online (Colgate, Buchanan & Elmsly, 2005).
Another major implementation issue has been the amount of employee access to the Internet. As Internet is a great source of communication, staff access needs to be controlled to increase their productivity at work. Employment records and criminal history has to be processed before recruiting new staff.
IBM System Journal. "Strategic Alignment: Leveraging Information Technology for Transforming Organizations." Last accessed April 14, 2007. http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/382/henderson.pdf
According to Tuncay Bayrak, in his paper, IT Support Services For Telecommuting Workforce, in new era of technology, organization faced many radical changes. The changes involved from traditional workplace into more technology ways. With the existence of various types of software that enable long-distance communication, telecommuting workforce has been evolved. Nowadays, the organization was transformed to become a network-based operating structure where employees are not tied to the workplace. Every day, the rank of telecommuter job continues to grow. Telecommuting job allows employees to work from home or remote locations across the world. The question is what is the different service support that was provided by the organization for telecommuter and traditionally employee in a regular office. The aims of this study are to explain many types of support service for telecommuting employee that can be provided and the different support service that needed for telecommuters and desktop computing. The goal of this paper is to provide a framework to help IT manager to solve the issues in increase their potential benefit of providing good support service.
In summary, “Internet activities are not most significant in competition, such as informing customers, processing transactions, and procuring inputs”. (Porter, 2001) significant corporate assets--skilled employees, proprietary product, and efficient logistical systems – these factors are the most important to keep competitive advantages. In fact, it is foreseeable that the Internet's evolution will come up in the future involve a shift “in thinking from e-business to business, from e-strategy to strategy”. (Porter, 2001)Only by integrating the Internet into overall strategy will this powerful new technology become an equally powerful force for competitive advantage.
The advent technological advancement and globalization has revolutionized the workplace and global economy respectively. This has rapidly transformed the global economy which continually is shaping the modus operandi of the globalized-trade liberalization. Hence, the crucial need to diagnose and examine the issues and challenges involved in deploying the use of computerized platforms as workplace tools in enhancing performance and productivity respectively. Therefore, investment into attracting, retention, developing and motivating competent employees could drive organizational developmental growth in order to achieve competitive edge and successful to facilitate corporate survival.
In today's competing world, many organizations are rethinking their strategies in terms of the online business and its capabilities and culture. Organizations are taking advantage of the widespread web to buy and sell goods from other companies and recently from individual customers. Exploiting these opportunities of convenience, availability and widespread reach of the web or Internet, many companies such as Amazon have benefited from the use of web successfully.
Henderson and Venkatraman proposed a model for business – IT alignment; it was intended to support the integration of information technology (IT) into business strategy by advocating alignment between and within four domains (see figure 1). The inter-domain alignment is pursued along two dimensions: strategic fit (between the external and internal domain) and functional integration (between the business domain and the IT domain). The objective of this model was to provide a way to align information technology with business objectives in order to realise value from IT investments. The authors argued that the potential strategic impact of information technology requires both an understanding of the critical components of IT strategy and its role in supporting and shaping business strategy decisions and a process of continuous adaptation and change. Hence, they presented a model that defines the range of strategic choices facing managers.
While technological innovations can provide increased opportunities for organizations and give them a competitive advantage, not all employees respond well to changes in their everyday workflow. When an organization updates its systems, it can face some resistance from employees, especially when the employees do not feel properly trained and lack the confidence in using the new system. Employees may grow frustrated and become less productive and efficient. In some extreme cases, technology can also replace some of their duties and make their positions obsolete, leaving them out of a job. This ties back to the need for job security. Technology has come a long way in the past 50 years and the types of challenges just mentioned are a lot more common in this day and age than they were before. Therefore, managers need to adapt to this changes in the work environment and find a way to satisfy their employees’ needs while increasing work performance and
During the past decade, the internet has revolutionized and changed the way organizations do business by offering rapid communication systems and enhanced information access and innovation of technological advancements have created a brave new workplace. Further, the internet enables organizations to decrease expenses, reduce product life cycle time, market goods and services more efficiently (Anandarajan et al, 2000). However, with these kinds of benefits, the internet provides employees with a technique
Technology is now central to successful businesses. It has enabled systematic storage of operational & managerial data. However, businesses face challenges with this. Each Employee working in different location has to manage individual data. Also, managing complex IT infrastructure takes away the IT staff from the important projects.
Business today is inextricably intertwined with technology, from the smallest home office, to a multinational corporation with multiple monolithic legacy application. It is impossible to be in business today without confronting the issues of technology. The way we do business today is different than 30 years ago. Technology has evolved around the areas of telecommunication, travel, stock market, shipping even around our daily lives. E-commerce a system by which people can buy, sell and deal without even seeing the person on the other side has taken a front seat in improving the economy of countries around the world. Technology today has made it possible for monetary institutions to help locate the customers resources and help solve their problems at any given time through online banking. The Internet, a boon to all business, is playing a part of a catalyst; it links millions of customers to its suppliers and vice versa due to this, manufactures are able to cut the role of middlemen and are able to deal with the customers, giving them the ability for direct input from the customers about their choices and views of their product. The busi...
ICT has revolutionized the world especially in commerce, education and socialization. It has reduced the world into a small global village. This has been facilitated by the greatest innovation in the information and communication technology (ICT): the internet. Since its innovation, there have been many benefits and opportunities that have been realized from different quotas including; education sector, business sector, health sector, communication sector and transport sector among others. Many organizations in these and other sectors have in one way or another adopted the use of the internet so as to enhance their services, processes and products. In addition, the use of ICT has become one of the factors that add to competitive advantage and thus every other organization wants to gain this competitive edge against other organizations: including Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Organizations and individuals have to strategically position themselves in order to take advantage of the growing technology and achieve business competitive advantage while at it (DeHaven 2010 pg 1). Technology has enabled globalization; where ideas, products and services have been shared. This has promoted foreign businesses thus helping different economies all across the globe. Different organizations and individuals have realized that technology will keep growing and changing and the best strategy will be to adapt it other than holding to rigid ways of doin...
The rapid development of information systems and technology brings some positive effects to individuals. In order to use information systems effectively, individuals need to acquire skills and knowledge on using different computer technology. Take an example of an individual working in a project on market research, he needs to learn the way to use spreadsheets for analysing the data. The new knowledge acquired by the individuals will lead to upskilling effect. The innovation of technology brings a lot more new channels of communication, such as e-mail and instant messaging applications, it increases interaction between individuals. The barriers of location is eliminated by technology, people can communicate with one another in anywhere around the world through Internet. In addition, virtual office and work from home are becoming a common practice for companies, people can enjoy more flexibility in working locations and hours, and this is particularly beneficial to individuals who have young children at h...
When it comes to network management, one method we have to mention is that intranet - one of the most popular network management methods in current companies. An increasingly common corporate tool for organizing access to proprietary databases, an intranet is an internal web site that runs entirely on a private local or wide area computing network (Rouse, 2006). Unlike the usual connection to the Internet which connects by dedicated telecommunication links or phone lines whereas an intranet relies on corporate data networks. This means that data transfer rates toward to far faster on an intranet than on a normal Internet connection. In this part, similarly, taking intranet establishment as an example to explain that why network management makes an enormous contribution to the development of the companies. Firstly, an obvious intranet benefit is its cost-effective feature which it gets from the paperless environment. Under an intranet environment, a company can publish most of the company documents through the intranet platform which can save the company’s money on printing files and distributing data, copying and document maintenance overhead. For example, the HRM company PeopleSoft “derived significant cost savings by shifting HR processes to the intranet” McGovern(2002) mentioned. McGovern continue to say that the manual enrollment cost in benefits was around USD109.48 per enrollment, "shifting this process to the intranet reduced the cost per enrollment to $21.79; a saving of 80 percent". Another company that saved money on expense reports was Cisco. In 1996, Cisco processed 54,000 reports, amounting to USD19 million, the cost per report was USD50.69 whereas thanks to the process had been moved to the intranet, in process cost ...
Advances in technology have changed businesses dramatically, in particular the communication and information technology that are conducted in firms, which changed the appearance and pace of businesses over the past few decades. ICT in particular, has evolved a lot over the past 30 years; important information can be stored in computers rather than being in drawers enabling information to be transferred at a greater volume and speed (Guy, 2009). ICT has also expanded various forms of telecommunications and workload conducted in businesses, internet examples of this include: e-mails can be used to communicate with others...