In 2005, when IT consultancy CSC and the Financial Executives Research Foundation conducted a survey of 782 American executives responsible for IT, 50% of the respondents admitted that “aligning business and IT strategy” was a major problem. Catastrophes-such as the one at American pharmaceutical distributor FoxMeyer Drug, which went into Chapter 11 and was sold in 1997 when a $100 million IT project failed-may be less frequent today than in the past, but frustration, delay, and disappointment are all too common. Most managers feel ill equipped to navigate the constantly changing technology landscape and thus involve themselves less and less with IT.Īdding to executives’ diffidence, corporate IT projects have often delivered underwhelming results or been outright failures.
#Information technology business how to#
It’s hard for executives to figure out what all those systems, applications, and acronyms do, let alone decide which ones they should purchase and how to successfully adopt them. One of the biggest problems companies face is coping with the abundance of technologies in the marketplace. However, as IT’s drumbeats become louder, they threaten to overwhelm general managers. In fact, American companies spend as much on IT each year as they do on offices, warehouses, and factories put together. By 2004, the latest year for which government data are available, that amount had more than tripled to $5,100 per employee.
corporations’ investment in IT per employee averaged $1,500.
#Information technology business portable#
Computer hardware keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more portable new technologies such as mashups, blogs, wikis, and business analytic systems have captured the imagination and corporate IT spending has bounced back from the plunge it took in 2001. In the information era, the best of times are the worst of times. Different types of technology bring about different types of organizational change, and managers should tailor their own roles accordingly.Ĭategorizing IT in this manner can help leaders determine which technologies to invest in and how they can assist organizations in making the most of them. Enterprise IT brings with it approaches such as customer resource management and supply chain management and lets companies re-create interactions between groups of workers or with business partners. Network IT includes capabilities like e-mail, instant messaging, and blogs and helps people communicate with one another. Function IT encompasses technologies-such as spreadsheet and word-processing applications-that streamline individual tasks. Information technology can be classified into three types, each of which provides companies with a particular level of change. What’s most important, though, is that they look beyond the individual IT projects they select to the broader picture of how IT is likely to affect the organization. Executives have three critical responsibilities when it comes to IT: They must help choose technologies, using an inside-out approach that keeps the true needs of the business in mind smooth the adoption of those technologies, taking into account that they may encounter strong resistance and encourage their exploitation, by leveraging already standardized data and work flows. Furthermore, many so-called advancements haven’t lived up to expectations: Frustration, delays, and even outright failures tempt many executives to avoid dealing with IT altogether.īut those who turn away are selling their companies short. Managers are hard-pressed to figure out what all those innovations do, let alone which ones to adopt and how to implement them. Search for a location near you, and reach out to Cisco Networking Academy directly.Ĭisco training and certification programs provide additional learning paths for people interested in IT careers.The information age has brought with it a host of new technologies-and an overabundance of choices. This is the ultimate way to get hands-on experience while gaining career-ready skills. You can take Cisco Networking Academy IT courses in person at a local educational institution, as most Networking Academy students do.
They work to protect the integrity of organizations' networks and data. Today, a myriad of connected user devices and a growing and diverse collection of connected IoT devices-such as LED lighting, cameras, door locks, thermostats, machine monitoring controls, TVs, and even air conditioners-come under the purview of IT.Ĭybersecurity specialists play a key role in securing information systems. In recent years, the scope of IT has been shifting to more than just computers, switches, routers, and access points. Over the decades, IT technicians' primary focus has been on designing, installing, managing, and troubleshooting computers and networking components.
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