One of the most significant trends since the 1990s has been the sharp increase in global business activities. Information technology as the key industry of the modernization since last century is becoming an indispensable part in the process of globalisation. The explosive growth of the internet and the World Wide Web has been of equal or even greater significance. The development of information technology brings people not only opportunities, but also risks and challenges.
People always have to think about how to make full use of these opportunities and solve the problems and avoid the risks, especially when they are living in the so competitive world. For the business people, this is also a process of how they gain competitive advantages and how they create values in the global market. There are many different ways for people to add value to the business. In business, value is mostly determined by the customers. Business value should be added to these 3 parts: the customer franchise management, the new products or services, and the channel management.
Why I think the information technology is important?
Information technology is playing a more and more important role in our modern life. IT industry is getting involved in almost all the areas of our life, people can hardly imagine the days without mobile phones or computers. Then here come the questions: why we think the information technology is so important? What exactly the information technology is?
According to the definition from Information the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the information technology is “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.” IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information. The information technology is a series of advanced technologies or applications for people to access, manage the information. In the business sector, an advanced developed information technology and information management means greater worldwide standardization of computing platforms, vastly increased global information flows; and all of these provide people chances to enhance the human competencies and variety of enrichment and collaboration.
To understand the information management, it is essential to understand the agendas of information technology as people attempt to extend their global reach throughout the economies and customers of many countries in the global market. Information technology agendas reflect current trends in the global economy: greater integration of mature markets, newly emerging markets, common currencies (e.g., the Euro), new trading partners, and the overriding impact of the Internet and its related technologies in stimulating global business activity. The information technology industry also reflects the customers’ needs in the global market. Since this is very useful and important for the global business today, we realize the importance of the information technology.
IT skills
To use information technology to provide people competencies and variety of collaboration, people have to grasp some essential IT skills. For different work, people need to master different IT skills, but there are also some basic IT skills, which should be familiar for almost everyone. There seem to be 4 basic skills in the information management and technology management: orchestration; appropriation; enrichment; and collaboration. In general, orchestration means the ability to map the information flows to the clients’ needs. Appropriation can be described as the ability to convince the different clients to use the internet in a business context. Enrichment is the ability to help the clients use the services to produce value. Collaboration means the ability of teams or groups to work together to solve the clients’ problems.
In the following posts, we will try to find out, how people use information technology to enhance the human competencies and what skills will be needed for using the information technology to enhance business benefits and create values in organizations.
Enjing Zhan
