Advantages of Information Technology In Business – Increased Efficiency
The main advantage of implementing and improving information technology in a business is the increased efficiency that it brings. Businesses are built around all kinds of processes, and a lot of these processes are repetitive, slow, and boring for people to perform. Computers and systems can be designed and implemented to perform these processes based on strict business rules – processes such as service desk call logging, file archiving, or customer records management. These tasks could actually be done by people, but computers and systems can perform them more accurately (if designed well) and a lot faster than people could. This brings us nicely to the next advantage of information technology in business…
More Useful And Relevant Work For Employees
We humans are fantastic creatures. We have highly developed brains, capable of making complicated decisions and improving our standard of living. We shouldn’t need to spend our time performing repetitive work that computers could do for us. Many automated tasks can and should be performed by information technology systems. All we would need to do is provide the input, the system would then do the processing, and provide an output. This would free up our time and allow us to perform more relevant work, such as building relationships in the business, making decisions, developing ideas, and providing service to customers – things that are hard for computer systems to do!
Better Decision Making For Management
One of the most useful functions of and advantages of information technology is to store large amounts of data. Years and years of individual customer records, transactions, data movements and updates are stored all over company systems. This data can be used, aggregated, analysed and displayed in almost any format imaginable, to allow employees to make better decisions about their company. Data can show customer trends, financial analysis, system response times, profitable customers, anything that you have stored can be displayed in a suitable format. This allows employees – both analysts and management – to look at this data and make decisions on it to improve the company and provide a better service.
Improved Service To Customers
Over the years, information technology in businesses has improved to a point where it has helped provide a better service to customers. This can be measured in many ways – decreased hold times for customers dialling in, more accurate information being provided to customers for their accounts, faster turnaround times for products and services, better management of information and how to apply it to a customer. All of these points can be attributed to the advantages of information technology in business.
I know I often make calls to my phone company/bank/insurance company or any other company that has incoming calls. Over the years, they have improved their systems to allow for better redirection of calls, call monitoring, account information and integration so they’re able to solve my problem and answer my question quicker and easier than they could have in the past.
Of course, it’s the employee who answers the questions and does the work, but it’s the computer system that provides them with the information they need to do so.
Do you have any other points on the advantages of information technology in business? Post them in the area below! Stay tuned for the next post on some of the disadvantages of information technology in business.
Thanks for reading!