Technology impact on Business - Essay Example

Advanced technology Technology is now being increasingly used to contribute to an improved experience for citizens in their interactions with the Government. The Federal Office Systems Exposition (FOSE) recently brought together buyers and sellers featuring products using advanced technology. One of these is the unified communications tool, which for example automatically sends a voice mail with an email message so that the user can play it back on a desktop, without the need to be near a phone to receive the message.

Cisco has entered into a Customer Network Interaction system with the Internal Revenue Service, to improve citizen experiences in interacting with the IRS. The product was developed based upon the expectations of a citizen, such as customization and multiple communication options as well as virtual personalized assistance.(Lyon, 2008). Features of the IRS contact center include round-the-clock customer access using one click that can access the customer’s desired choice of assistance, such as chat, video or audio help.

Using this improved technology, more customers can be served using fewer resources, thereby resulting in improved efficiency and higher levels of customer satisfaction. The author has pointed out that as the technology evolves, it is likely to improve further and become more mobile, requiring fewer devices to function efficiently. This article also provides details of improved technology devices that can contribute to a cleaner, greener environment. One of these is the EPEAT, a project of the Green Electronics Council.

This program is a tool that helps customers to compare monitors, desktops and personal computers in order to evaluate their impact on the environment in terms of the waste they generate. For example, some of these electronic devices may contain toxic or hazardous compounds and if these components are not discarded properly, they could pose a danger to the environment and can also harm public health. The EPEAT technology consists of three basic components. The first is a standard that contains fifty one environmental performance criteria IEEE 1680 to 2006 Standard for the environmental assessment of personal computers.

Twenty three of these fall under the mandatory criteria while twenty eight of these criteria are optional, but all of them fall under eight basic categories – the selection of materials, reduced use of environmentally sensitive materials, conservation of energy, ensuring product longevity and ensuring they are designed with end of life management so they can be appropriately recycled or disposed of, corporate performance of the product and packaging materials used. The program also has an inbuilt system for identifying and verifying which are the products that meet the criteria, as well as a calculator that tabulates the environmental benefits from each calculator.

The EPEAT system ranks computer systems on the basis of these various performance criteria and assigns them a ranking of bronze, silver or gold. Bronze is the minimum that must be attained by the electronic system while the other two rankings indicate superior systems in terms of environmental performance.The last technological advance discussed in this article is cloud computing, whereby a user is able to access computing power through a network only when it is needed, through the use of shared computing resources.

In essence, technological capability hovers like a cloud over all systems and can be harnessed by a user when required, as opposed to using local servers. The author is of the view that this is equivalent to democratization of information, making it available anywhere, anytime, to anybody. In Government work, this would be useful for teams from different agencies who would find it easier to collaborate with each other. This is however, still a developing concept as compared to the earlier two, which are already established.

Reference:* Lyon, Martin P, 2008. “FOSE: The grass is greener….”, 37(2): 58-64