Need done by tomorrow

BA101 Week 6 Lecture

Welcome to week six. Let’s get started. Please select lessons, week 6 in the getting started folder. This week's learning objective is to understand the role information technology plays in organizations. Your activities this week included some reading of related articles, a lecture, and discussion question, and an assignment. Go ahead and print out the getting started page. It is always a good idea to do this. Keep it next to you - one of the things I like to do is check off each activity as I complete them to make sure that I have completed everything successfully for the week. So what is required of you this week? As in any way to be sure to read the material. Be sure to ask questions of your professor if you have any participate early and often in the discussion forums and complete your assignments focusing on completeness, timeliness, and professionalism.

Let’s take a look at lecture one in week six which is the role of information technology in organizations. During this lecture we will discuss the role information technology plays in organizations. I'd like to begin our lecture by taking a minute to discuss technology in general. As long as there have been human beings on this planet there has been technology in some way shape or form. Whether it was the cavemen carving and shaping rocks to use as wheels or creating the first personal computer technology, has driven the evolution of our species and our civilization. According to Brian Arthur in his latest book the nature of technology more than anything else technology creates our world. It creates are wealth, our economy, our very way of being. Think about this for just a minute - wouldn't you agree when discussing technology is often difficult to separate it from society as a whole. Technology allows us to look at the world differently and to see beyond what is, in a matter of speaking, compared to what could be. this ability has allowed us to create innovative solutions and technologies that have helped our society flourish through the generations and well beyond what we ever thought were imaginable. Is important for us to understand that when we are first developing and exploring concepts we need to be creative but yet keep in mind what is reasonable to create. It is this exciting combination of creativity and reason that encourages us to learn from our past mistakes, push boundaries that we think we are not possible. And to dream future possibilities. Now let's shift gears and discuss the basic role of information technology in organization.

Information technology or IT as it is commonly referred to as recently become essential for organizations to efficiently conduct business. I don't care if you are global corporation that maintains a room full of mainframe servers or a one-person operation that owns a single computer - IT plays a role in how efficiently you operate. From a very basic standpoint technology helps organizations efficiently manage information that is vital to their operation - from the flow of data to employee records. Technology also allows organizations to operate with little manpower which helps to lower the cost of doing business. It connects the organization to their distributors, their customers, and their employees. also because of its ability to lower costs and allows instantaneous access to information so organizations are better able to offer lower pricing of their products without having to sacrifice quality. There are countless reasons that IT is essential to business, however for our purposes I think we'll just focus on four of the most important roles of IT which are: managing communication, and managing inventory, managing data and managing customer relationships. Managing communication means e-mail is the chosen format of communicating for many businesses and provides an easy and low-cost way for businesses to communicate with employees, distributors, and customers. Managing inventory helps businesses manage their inventory by keeping track of the quantities of each product they want to keep in stock and will trigger an order when the amount falls below the predetermined quantity. managing data means storing electronic versions of all documents that are instantly available for immediate access and managing customer relationship means IT helping to improve how business manage relationships with their customers by using software that will record all interactions a business has with a customer.

Your course folder for week six has several articles that you're to read, but one article is particularly interesting to me and that is the one entitled “technology levels the business playing field”. According to the small business administration small businesses represent 99.7% of all firms. They create more than half of the private nonfarm gross domestic product and may create 60 to 80% of all new net jobs. When they think about the economic impact of information technology the first companies to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Yahoo, but the biggest impact on the economy may well show up in small and medium-size enterprises. The reason is that information technology is a great leveler. As computers get cheaper and more powerful and more connected technologies that were only available to the Wall-Marts of the world become available to the small fry. Think about the lowly cash register there was a big innovation in the 1880s when manufacturers added a bell that sounded when the money drawer opens so owners would know when someone had access to the cash but after that the technology barely changed for almost a century. The big companies like Wal-Mart could use satellite networks and mainframe computers to track purchases, manage inventory, and track customer behavior, but the little retailer had to do with the old account registers scrolling through the paper tape in the evening by hand and punching numbers into an adding machine to balance its books. Then, along came the personal computer of the late 1980s cash registers have become just another computer application that can add receipts, compare sales with inventory, create order list - in short they could do just about everything the big chains to do. In the 1990s cash registers became network allowing the small stores to download records in a form suitable for spreadsheet analysis and accounting software. these intelligent cash registers allows small companies to adopt business models that had previously been available only to large enterprises and equipped with a scanner a cash register could be used to verify the sale of each item allowing customers and companies to share data on a revenue with the supplier. Some ice cream manufacturers effectively contract for space for freezer in a store and share the revenue from purchases each time a sale is made.

Even the success of the big internet companies rests in large part in the fact they have advertising for small companies. Amazon, Google. And Yahoo all make it possible for small businesses to reach out nationally and even globally markets that was approved previously inaccessible. The Internet has not just affected the selling side of small businesses; it is also having a big impact on the production side. I recently went to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. One told me her software company has six employees, two in the United States and four New Delhi. The other started a company to develop applications and services for mobile phones. His company has five employees in the United States, eight in Spain, and two in Italy. Both of these micro-multinational companies were pretty much the same way using e-mail webpages, voice over Internet phone services, and other Internet technology to coordinate their far-flung operations. Just think, said one - my little six person operation is now global business. American workers complain about big businesses sending jobs offshore to India and China, economists say that the benefits from international trade outweigh the cost which is great as long as you're not one of the costs.

Offshore work means something quite different to the micro-multinationals. These companies simply would not exist without access to foreign labor. If they succeed they will certainly hire more American workers as they grow. The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago. It is no surprise that many of these small, high-tech, international entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have the contacts, the connections, and that most critical ingredient the ambition to assemble the pieces needed start a business. It is almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign development team together without some strong connections on the ground. Even large multinationals have found out that outsourcing is not the panacea it was proclaimed to be. Paradoxically it is easier for the micro-multinationals to deal with the inconvenience of outsourcing that it is for the big international corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do things that big international corporations will not do - like staying up until 11 PM and using cheap voice over Internet technology rather than expensive international telephone service. constant supervision constant communication and constant coordination are necessary to make small business grow, but it is just these things - the ability to supervise communicate and coordinate a distance that it becomes so much cheaper in the last 20 years. Big enterprises were the first to reap the benefits of this technological progress but the impact of information technology on small and medium-sized enterprises may yet turn out to have the most impact on the economy.

Congratulations on finishing all of the weekly readings and activities for week six managing information, but to be truly successful with this week and you need to complete the discussion question as well as the assignment. The discussion question this week is what is the impact that technology has had on our society. And if you had a chance to listen to the article technology levels the business playing field you’ll have a lot of information that you can use in this particular discussion forum. now remember there is a participation requirement that you must submit your initial substantial reply by day five and you need to reply two additional times to students and or your instructor by day seven there is a word limit of 75 150 words but that's just the minimum you can go over and please remember that replies to fellow students such as I agree, good job, way to go, I really understand – don’t count as one of your responses. In Your assignment this week you are to identify and discuss the evolution of information technology and the impact that is has had on business if you're going to create a PowerPoint presentation, to write a summary of an article for a newsflash, or to research identifying discuss the evolution of information technology and the impact it has had on business for traditional paper. again please note that we're looking for critical thinking were looking for analysis and evaluation synthesis and summary if you need some help in putting together these materials are papers. Please don't hesitate to go to the location on the front page of your course where you can go down scroll down a bit and you'll see that there is on that page the online tutoring service from the student advising and learning center. Also there’s free tutoring for US military families at tutor.com. Also the APA style guide on the very front of your course description. All of these can be very helpful to you so please don't hesitate to take advantage of these writing services. let tell you why - a lot of people say that they haven't been in school for a long time maybe they have forgotten how to write grammatically correct papers maybe they never learned how to write a grammatically correct paper in the first place or maybe they say they just don't like to write but here's what I want you to know: you're going to need to learn to communicate effectively as a manager or leader and part of that communication style is effective writing and so getting help today and building knowledge skills and abilities while you're in college will be very beneficial to you as you graduate and try to get another job in industry somewhere else because I can assure you that wherever you go from here if you plan to be a manager or leader you will need to communicate effectively through the written word so get some help here, learn how to do research, learn how to use APA style effectively take the time to learn while you're in college so that when you graduate you have this necessary skill that business is looking for, and one final note if you do need extra time in finishing your assignment please contact your professor in advance of being late and of course if you have any questions please don't hesitate to get with them and to ask them any questions that you may have regarding the week six activities