how information technology infuences our society and development business world?

Answer 1

Internet has transformed our lives and the way we communicate, how we learn, how we work and spend
free time, in essence – it has more or less changed every aspect of human society one can think of. The
significance of the Internet and information technology (IT) in both business and private field has grown
considerably in the last years, with exponential growth of Internet users and services offered.
Since – in today's business environment – people and their knowledge are company's key assets, it is
obvious and expected of each company to be aware and prepared for such changes. Not only (or not at
all) are the IT specialists ones that should be aware of the new trends and understand them, but also (or
even first and foremost) the managers.
Current Influence of the Internet and IT
The number of Internet users has grown over 300 million in year 2000 (predictions for year 2005 are set
for one billion), a third of USA's economic growth in the period 1996-99 is directly attributed to the
Internet explosion. There are over 2 billion web pages and more than 17 million registered domains
(State of the Internet, 2000). These facts already indicate that the Internet has significant effect on how,
why, where and when people work.
The Internet and IT have the most prominent influence on more educated, skilled and ambitious people,
especially those, that are regularly working with information and communication technology (ICT).
Any potential advantage of the Internet-usage, that a company can exploit to recruit, develop and retain
these types of personnel, is even more important due to the fact that there is a shortage of highly profiled
people in the workforce market.
Use of Internet for Staffing
American research (Global 500 Web Site Recruiting, 2000) shows, that 79% of companies from the
Global 500 group (500 largest world companies by revenue) at least to a certain extent use the Internet
for seeking new personnel. Also, comparison of data for years 2000 and 1998 shows that percentage of
companies that use the Internet for mentioned purpose has grown considerably from 29% in 1998. According
to 1999 RIS-research (RIS – "Raba Interneta v Sloveniji" - Usage of Internet in Slovenia.), only
4% of companies have used Internet for recruiting in same fashion. The main advantages for Internetsupported
recruiting are (Achieving Results with Internet Recruiting, 1998):
· Lower costs of recruiting (savings in invitations for application, postal-costs, data-processing
costs…).
· Quicker process of recruitment: period from the point when the need for a new employee is
sensed until the point when he starts doing his job is, according to the research, cut for twelve
days.
· Possibility to attract better and more candidates – invitation for application published on a website
can also be spotted by those, who are currently not seeking new employment actively.
Besides the corporate websites, third-party websites are gaining importance. Not only that they act as
"work- force exchange" where supply meets demand and vice versa, many of them also publish relevant business news, articles on job-hunting, CV writing etc., which acts as additional pull mechanism for web
users, which ensures head- hunting companies that their call for applications is seen.
Use of Internet for New Ways of Work
With Internet and (more broadly) Information-and-Communications-Technology (ICT) deve lopment in
the full swing for the last two decades, organisations have been provided with 'a whole range of new
possibilities for performing work and structuring organisations' (Lindstrom, Moberg & Rapp, 1997),
which will undoubtedly extend even more in the future and therewith grasp even wider sphere of employees.
Two of new ways of work are discussed below.
Teleworking
There are many definitions of teleworking and in the field also many various terms are being used, for
example telework, telecommuting, flexiplaces, electronic cottages... Yet as the purpose of our paper is
not teleworking itself the following definition will be quite satisfactory. As outlined in European Commission's
annual report for year 2000 (Johnston & Nolan, 2001), telework is a wide concept, whose
'common element' is 'the use of computers and telecommunications to change the accepted geography of
work'. It means that we are 'moving the work to workers instead of moving the workers to work', with
help of information technologies (Nilles, 1998).
Teleworking offers significant advantages, which could be summarized and classified in three views:
individual's, organisational and macro-societal; from the second perspective, benefits of telecommuting
include higher productivity ("more work being done") and "decrease of absenteeism". Because the employees
are more satisfied and their morale is increased, they are more unlikely to be searching for another
job – organisations experience lower turnover rate; according to Dash, employee fluctuation can
decrease by 50-80% when teleworking is introduced (Dash, 1999). Besides, organisations have 'the ability
to access a broader pool of employees as the geographic tie to an "office" are diminished' (Venkatesh
& Speier, 2000). Furthermore, organizations 'real estate costs can be cut because of the reduced office
space requirements' (Nilles, 1998). Additionally, customer service improves due to flexible working
hours (twenty- four-seven concept) (Telework the Benefits – and some Issues, 2000).
According to a research, 18% of Dutch, 12% of US and 5% of German and English employees were
regularly teleworking to a certain extent (How many teleworkers, 2000), furthermore, the percentage has
been increasing with a yearly rate of 10 to 15% in all of ICT-developed countries (Gordon, 1999). In this
area, Slovenia is out of step with "developed" countries. According to a research (Raba Interneta v
Sloveniji, 2000), there were approximately 50% of companies that have technological possibilities for
teleworking yet only 29% of these companies have introduced teleworking. Viewed from the whole
work- force population and taking into account the size of the companies, only 2% of full-time employed
workers can be considered to telework in same fashion as their Dutch and US counterparts.
Project-oriented work with subcontracting
According to economics theory, two of the main reasons for pooling of human resources into companies
are the cost reduction that is achieved with partitioning of work and the need for management of work,
which is divided between numerous employees.
Though, today's ICT enables efficient collection of people with similar interest and complementary
skills, and their cooperation in short- or long-term projects. All that without necessarily being a formal
part of the company.
For the future we can predict that there will be a growing number of "portfolio people" which will not
want to be bound to a certain company but will offer their skills on a market to the best clients and customers
(not necessarily top payers!), either individually (i.e. using their-own-presentation web pages) or
via specialized (non)electronic agencies.
The main advantage of this way of work, company wise, is inflow of new, fresh ideas and higher workforce-
efficiency (no need for recruiting "on stock"); what is more, such "portfolio employees" have
extensive experience from working with other companies and can – in such part time relationships –
gain huge amount of new knowledge. On the other hand, disadvantages include higher fluctuation level,
lesser degree of loyalty to a company and wounded security of confidential business info rmation.
Additionally, the question of social and health insurance will have to be solved – in the United States,
some agencies that offer subcontractors, have decided to cover mentioned costs for "their" workers for
the time when they are not subcontracted (Flynn, 2000).
Use of Internet for Employee-Development
Acquiring new and supplementing existing knowledge is one of the top- level motivational factors for a
person that has covered his basic existential needs, therefore as it a key success factor for an individual it
is also critical for successfulness of organization as a whole. Internet-based technology offers numerous
possibilities for getting hold of new knowledge and skills. Firstly, company wise, it offers much quicker
access to latest scientific and technological innovations of other companies and research institutions
(Jerman-Blazic, 1996). For each individual it offers itself as vast searchable database of web pages,
newsgroups, mailing lists, online courses, forums, etc.
Effect of ICT and Internet on Organization
Information and communication technology and the Internet have not affected only the IT professionals
and those employees that use IT for their work on a regular basis but also the environment of the organization,
organization itself and the "social universe" (Drucker, 2001). Managers need to be aware of these
changes, try to sense them in advance and adapt to them appropriately.
Especially in the field of employee-motivatio n we can expect essential changes. Even though visionaries
predict deep and fundamental shifts in society, authors believe that first and foremost task of managers
will remain motivating employees: firstly to arouse needs in employees and secondly to show them the
way how to satisfy those needs in a manner, which contributes to achievement of organizational goals.
Yet if the fundamental concept remains the same, the changes will most definitely occur in employees'
values and consecutively in their needs and in a manner in which their needs are satisfied. It is expected
that "traditional" needs, i.e. salary and benefits, guarantee for permanent situation, loyalty to the company
etc., will gradually lose their meaning. Infoworld's research (2000), that was undertaken between
IT professionals, reveals that most of them feel that the most important benefit, expected from a company,
is possibility to work from home, with salary and chance for promotion being less important (Ba ttey,
2000). IT professionals are, na turally, more susceptible to novelties, therefore the cited research
cannot be taken as representative situation in other professional fields, yet very similar changes can be
expected elsewhere as well.
Changes in information management and exploitation of knowledge
"Managing your company's knowledge more effectively and exploiting it in the marketplace
is the latest pursuit of those seeking competitive advantage," (Skyrme, 1998).
Acquisition of knowledge by individual is relatively easy compared to successful exploitation of all the
knowledge that resists in organizations' employees' minds. According to American research (Gopal,
1995), companies take advantage of only 20% of the knowledge that exists inside their employees.
Information and communication technology offers numerous possibilities to improve information ma nagement
in organizations and therewith make better use of employees' knowledge. One of such options
is use of intranet as internal information system of a company, which is based on Internet protocols and
services (Turk, & Jaklic, 1998). It enables relatively inexpensive and simple storage, organization, processing,
maint enance and sharing of information between organizations' members; all these tasks are essential
for good information management, according to (Marchand et al., 2001). At the same time such
information is (in technological manner at least) securely kept from the outside world.
There are many other ways besides intranet for better use of stored knowledge (and for processing of
information from piles of data), i.e. data warehouses, data mining, expert systems…
Contemporary state-of-the-art soft- and hard-ware solutions offer support for knowledge-use, yet the
main obstacle is the one of the content and of the people – how to achieve that existing knowledge will
be shared, stored and transferred organization-wide with help of IT in the best way. Better business performance,
according to a twenty-eight month research which included over 1.000 senior managers
worldwide, comes not just from information technology but also from information management and
management of organization's people (Marchand et al., 2001).
I hope that answers your question.
Thanks.

Answer 2

information is knowledge. knowledge is power. Information Technology enable business to make the "right" decision. The information technology in the infomation is essential because it is the key to survival (next to operations managment which is how the business makes money) There's information in every aspect of business. Chossing which information to acquire, process is essential.