Investing in the IT Sphere - Essay Example

With advice from our technical crew, we were enlightened that our current human resources could not operate our kind of business without the backing of a well-established information systems department.

Our technical department argued that with most of our business processes and transactions being computer-based we had to take care of tasks such as system administration, computer hardware engineering and networking, management of data and software and database design. The option of external sourcing for professionals to carry out these tasks for us was expensive and not viable in the long term for our business.

According to Brynjolfsson (1994, p.6), investing in information technology does pay for several reasons and considering that, we have been able to reduce the workload on our workers while saving time, grow our business further and making profits, deliver quality, effective and satisfactory service to our clients due to the increased positive feedback responses, improve our overall production in terms of output from our human resource, tracing of our business courses and document storage facilitation, control our transportation and communication-related activities, thus cutting down on expenses involved, attract new businesses as a result of our new web augmentations such as blogs, client support structures, merchandise catalogues and newsletters as currently we are facing increased traffic and gain a competitive edge over our customers and increase the number of our customers.

As Brynjolfsson reiterated on the importance of information technology (1993, p.66-78), we too have managed to measure the impact information technology has had on our business and so far it’s a positive one. We considered a number of factors:

Customers - We had a look at the number of new and returning customers and we realized our numbers increased and so we seem to be heading in the right direction in terms of offering solutions to our customer needs.

Feedback responses - our feedback section was also used to gauge the impact of IT on our business and most of the feedback were very positive.

How many of our customers were able to have their requests, orders or problems fixed?

Were we able to describe their problem correctly and ensured our problem-solving procedure was effective and the solution satisfactory? These questions also helped us analyze the created impact. We gauged the impact of lacking human support as compared to having our system support, and if it has been offering solutions and in some cases, it wasn’t able if it was redirecting our customers to a link that will sort out their requests.