Understanding the basics What is information technology and how do we use it? Managers of small and big businesses are poisoning the web with low quality information only to increase business visibility to their business website. The increase of misleading and false information that causes poor customer feedback is what frightens most online users. Greater accuracy and reliable information places IT managers, web designers, and web programmers between a rock and a hard place. Poor information and low cost product web design can be harmful to a company’s reputation and cause bad customer feedback and decrease sales. Moreover, small business owners and corporation managers need to implement high quality, reliability, relevancy and information technology decisions into their organization’s competitive business strategy. What is information technology? Information technology is the set of methods or techniques for acquiring, organizing, storing, manipulating, and transmitting information. (Jones, G., & George, J., 2008, p. 707) Advancement in IT systems over the past decade has grown rapidly and an increasing number of new age “webmasters” and IT “professionals” are entering into the market with little or no knowledge of information technology and web based business systems. This new era of IT managers produce poor information and this shows in their product design and low quality services. Before the Internet people went to local libraries to check out books by well know authors and read the daily newspaper. The power of information technology in the 21stcentury is powered by the Internet and web based application Web Solutions where you can load, save, and update just about anything your heart desires, from streaming quotes to your local “online” newspaper. However, this new wave of information does not help us if we cannot trust the source it’s coming from. To give you an example; CNN a very trust worthy source, two weeks ago, ask viewers to send their video clips about their “opinions” on who should be the next president of the United States. CNN showed the video clips and even mentioned some pornographic videos they have seen but would not air them on the news. My opinion, CNN managers should not have release a “video-send-in” to viewers of their broad cast. What’s next? Live coverage of ducks crossing the street. To make my point, if you are a manager for a business, release strong information and facts to transmit information to the public, not opinions from “Joe the plumber” transmitting information from his blog or webpost.
Usefulness of Information Quality, relevance, completeness and timeliness all factor into the usefulness of information when consumers make a decision to buy a product or service. For an example, airline use computer technology to update live information on a hour to hour or even minute to minute basis with fights coming or going to airports. This information can be useful only to people with flights or those who are picking them up from the airport. Airline use flip boards or high tech computer screens to show viewers incoming flight information or cancellations of a particular flight. This real time information is not relevant but useful to customer. Moreover, think about if this technology had a glitch and was showing the wrong information; would the information still be useful? The answer is no of course not, this is the same reason company send thousands and even millions of dollars on new technology. “Information control is the process whereby managers regulate how efficiently and effectively an organization and it’s managers are performing the activities necessary to achieve organizational goals.” (Nickels W., McHugh J., & McHugh S., 2008, P. 708) There are four steps to follow: 1) Establish Measurable Standards 2) Measure Actual Performance 3) Compare Actual Performance Against Goals 4) Evaluate Results
To control an organization performance a manger must have important information about company activities. Company activities are the life line to company sales and revenue. To further control a company’s activities and control information, report writing and analysis is key to a successful organization and performance and quality guidelines. “Advances in IT have enabled managers to make gigantic leaps in the way they can collect more timely, complete, relevant, and high-quality information and use it in more effective ways. To better understand the ongoing revolution in IT that has transformed companies like Kroger, Herman Miller, and Bose and allowed them to improve their responsiveness to customer, minimize costs, and improve their competitive position, we need to examine several key aspects of advanced IT.” (Nickels W., McHugh J., & McHugh S., 2008, P. 711) “Online computer retailers sell computers from varying manufacturers. Online merchants allow you to compare packages from varying manufacturers to find the best configuration and price, processor speed, popularity, and other specifications.” (Baldauf K., & Stair R., 2008, P. 101) “The internet is continuously evolving, and anyone is free to design and add new applications.” (Baldauf K., & Stair R., 2008, Ch. 4) Advancement in IT and Web Design improves companies to a more competitive and allows them to compete on a more global level. Relevant information and quality products along with the right management to help control Advance IT operations allows companies to edge past their competitors in the 21st century. However, companies that do not constantly update their technology and further advancement in IT and web design with online stores and customer support will be left behind their competition to lose sales and being less efficient with company operations. Furthermore, advancement in web technologies and online systems brings new challenges to companies wanting to succeed in competitive market places. New challenges offers new opportunities for expanding markets to increase customer goods being sold online and rapid growth within new sectors of the market place. Advance IT systems and webmasters have difficult challenges to integrate proper solutions for new company technology and the increasing demand for innovative design and creative web based systems.
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