Development of IT : Revolution in business operations

Recent IT innovations in computer hardware, software, and networks have also enabled people to work more productively as employees in an office—as well as working as telecommuters at a site far from a home office, as members of “virtual” teams, or even as “free agents” contracted by organizations for a short-term period. Sales executives and other traveling management executives have become telecommuters with portable computers and other mobile equipment that give them access to company data anytime and essentially anywhere with an Internet connection. Some cities have also experimented with laws that require businesses to support telecommuting by implementing work schedules that require less commuting—such as four days working in the office and one day working outside it—to help protect the environment. Some new businesses might not even have a physical office building or headquarters. Instead, the company might operate as a “virtual organization” made up of individual professionals scattered across different domestic or global locations.

Working as a member of a virtual team that is, teams with members who are separated too far geographically to work face-to-face has also become increasingly common. Team members may use software that supports online team meetings and document sharing as well as perhaps videoconferencing from an online computer or in specially equipped videoconferencing rooms. Team leaders have learned to motivate workers and coordinate across different time zones at different work sites on different continents.

Individuals with specialized skills may also choose to work independently as free agents who contract out their services without being a permanent employee of any organization. Organizations may locate and hire free agents (from a Web site such as guru.com) to take advantage of time zone differences for designing slideshows, Web site development, telemarketing, or other specialized skills that are temporarily needed for a specific project or only needed periodically. By using free agents, companies also avoid having to make a long-term commitment to an employee for salary and expensive benefits (such as healthcare insurance).

Within organizations, supporting these new ways of competing and new ways of working with computer systems and networks is the responsibility of the information systems (IS) department. Although essentially all modern organizations today are dependent on IT networks and applications for processing transactions and managerial decision-making support, not all organizations have the same level of dependency on IT. Some organizations may still use IT primarily for back-office support but rely heavily

on person-to-person communications to operate their business; others may be heavily dependent on information systems up and running 24X7 for all their business operations but don’t aggressively invest in newer technologies to enable newer strategies. Organizations also don’t always have the same level of IT dependency over time.