Key Strategic Use Of Internet Technologies example essay topic

A key strategic use of Internet technologies is to build an E-business, which develops its business value by making customer value its strategic focus. An E-business enterprise uses Internet, intranet, and extra net E-commerce websites and services to keep track of their customers preferences; supply products, services, and information anytime, anywhere; and provide services tailored to the individual needs of their customers. IT management is a key ingredient in re engineering business operations by enabling radical changes to business processes that dramatically improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Internet technologies can play a major role in supporting innovative changes in the design of workflows, job requirements, and organizational structures in a company.

(Laud on, 2002, p. 37) Information technology can be used to strategically improve the quality of business performance. In a total quality management approach, IT can support programs of continual improvement in meeting or exceeding customer requirements and expectations about the quality of products, services, customer responsiveness, and other features. A business can use information technology to help it become an agile company. Then it can prosper in rapidly changing markets with broad product ranges and short model lifetimes in which it must process orders in arbitrary lot sizes, and can offer its customers customized products while maintaining high volumes of production. An agile company depends heavily on Internet technologies to help it be responsive to its customers with customized solutions to their needs and cooperate with its customers, suppliers, and other businesses to bring products to market as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. According to Castells, Information Technology evolves in a distinctively different pattern than previous technologies, thus constituting the informational mode of development a flexible -, pervasive, integrated and reflexive, rather than additive revolution.

The reflexivity of the technologies, the fact that any product is also raw material because both are information, has permitted the speeding up of the process of innovation. (Castells 2000, p 29-30) National, regional and local economies depend ultimately on the dynamics of the global economy to which they are connected through networks and markets. It reaches out to the whole planet but does not include the whole planet and excludes the majority in an uneven geography, and switches on and links up valuable inputs, markets and individuals whilst it switches others off. The third world has become increasingly diversified internally, the first world has generated exclusion and an emergent of a fourth world as being the most excluding part of the world not taking advantage of the IT revolution. Castells argues that the IT management revolution has bia-passed certain regions of the world. A fourth world is not just the less developed, but is loosing out from the IT Revolution.

(Castells 2000, p 32) A new kind of organization, the network enterprise, has arisen to operate in the global economy. The network enterprise is a virtual organization composed of many different types of businesses and networks of firms, supported by information technology, doing business with each other. Each part o the network enterprise may have autonomous set of goals; the performance of the given enterprise will depend on how well it is connected, and how well the goals of the network components are consisted with the goals of the network enterprise itself, while each enterprise may use different management techniques towards reaching similar goal. IT manager in such an environment should be a creative person.

Creativity always leads towards progress; therefore, since the IT environment is always under process of change and reconstruction, new creative ideas are vital in order to succeed.