Globalisation and the IT Explosion - Essay Example

Globalization and the IT explosion in the past decades have brought benefits as well as challenges to the management of projects and resources located across the globe. Project management includes resource management, and resources are of many types. Understanding the different resources and their management is important for strategic project management. This literature review examines the work of researchers in three areas of resource management: skills (competencies) and assets management; knowledge management; and challenges and benefits in virtual team management. While the literature reviewed in assets and skills management shed a lot of light on the different aspects of this subject, the literature on knowledge management brought out the methods of managing organizational knowledge. The difficulties and issues in managing virtual and extended teams also brought out the importance of cultural awareness in managing such teams. This paper will extensively shed light on how the IT sector has changed lives.

Management of resources can be defined as a comprehensive approach to the collection, storage, process, maintenance, and electronic information and the exchange of information between different organizations (de Brisis 141-149). There are a plethora of resources that an organization can exploit for its development, such as competencies or skills, assets, knowledge, and so on. Due to the rapid evolution of globalization, the resources and their management have also become distributed over time and space in different regions across the world that have different cultures and attitudes.

Management of Information Technology at the global scale is full of challenges. But there are also benefits that accrue to the organizations from the global resources that are accessible to them. Information resource management is important to the organization for gaining advantages over the competition and maintaining the successful operations of the organization. The advantages of good management of resources lie in improved productivity and quality of decision-making, as well as in the enhancement of task performance and organizational learning curve (Feng 1-24). Resources that are valuable and rare can benefit the company that owns them because of their obvious competitive advantage. But this advantage is temporary and can be made to sustain if the firm is able to protect the resources from being imitated, transferred, or substituted.

Assets are of prime importance to a company, assets can be of two types namely tangible and intangible. A tangible asset is easily seen or touched whereas an intangible asset cannot be felt or touched, classic example of a tangible asset is machinery, machinery can be seen and touched. Patents come under intangible assets, they cannot be seen nor can they be touched physically.