Importance of Information Technology in Education

Importance of information technology in educational sector is well known. Information technology helps the students as well as the teachers in studying the course material easily because of fast access. Studying the subjects with the help of online libraries and dictionaries has made grasping and increasing the knowledge easy for the students. The inclusion of information technology in the syllabus in schools, colleges and universities has helped them in grasping the subject well and getting their basics cleared. Since, many educational centers have the online grading system, it has been a boon for the parents of the children to keep a tab on their performances. Parents can also get the details of the attendance record of their child in schools.

Importance of information technology in management is quite significant. It helps the managers in adapting to the new business processes and also to predict the possible impact of new technologies. The managers can benefit from the efficiently prepared computer packages and the electronically stored confidential information. With just a single click of the mouse, they can have the relevant information in front of their screen. However, in order to be able to handle these software packages in a better way, the managers should have undergone quality training in information technology. Taking this need into consideration, many corporate companies are seen taking special efforts for the development of these soft skills by training programs prepared by experienceed software professionals.

The Successful Vendor Selection Process

The Successful Vendor Selection Process

The Five Step Vendor Selection Process

By James Bucki, About.com Guide

The vendor selection process can be a very complicated and emotional undertaking if you don't know how to approach it from the very start. Here are five steps to help you select the right vendor for your business. This guide will show you how to analyze your business requirements, search for prospective vendors, lead the team in selecting the winning vendor and provide you with insight on contract negotiations and avoiding negotiation mistakes.

1. Analyze the Business Requirements

2. Vendor Search

3. Request for Proposal (RFP) and Request for Quotation (RFQ)

4. Proposal Evaluation and Vendor Selection

5. Contract Negotiation Strategies

 

 

 

 

 

"Expectations Management" in IT Outsourcing

Steps to ensure maximum returns in offshore outsourcing

Expectations management has come a long way since the first boom of offshore outsourcing. However, there are still pitfalls and miscalculations in drawing up expectations. These steps will help both outsourcing buyers and providers with some food for thought to ensure effective expectations management and subsequently, higher returns on investments.

IT Outsourcing buyers
It is important to have a clear set of expectations for inside your. The information channels should be established from the beginning. If outsourcing is expected to solve an internal problem, the provider must be told. Specific designations of who will do what and at what time are important.
Ask yourself key questions like:
• What specific work do you want to outsource
• What kind of business relationship/deal do you want?
• What are the outcomes you want to accomplish for your organization?
• How will the relationship benefit the providers(s)?
• What do you see as the matrix of responsibility in relation to yourself and your outsourcing provider?
It is but natural that some issues will change in negotiations but it is best to begin with clarity. This will help prevent misunderstanding in the future.

IT Outsourcing Providers
A study by an independent agency showed that 67% vendors considered managing expectations an important factor in outsourced project success.
Outsourcing service providers should not promise what they cannot deliver. They should proactively determine a client’s requirements and expectations of an outsourcing relationship, provider capabilities and state upfront what is correct. Nothing is more damaging in an outsourcing arrangement than raising expectations which cannot be met. Never make assumptions: sometimes companies and suppliers both make assumptions that cause difficulties in the partnership. Communicating provider’s capabilities is the key to successful outsourcing. Similarly, knowing precisely what are client goals and objectives goes a long way in helping draw effective expectations management points.

Finally, to assure performance will be measured against original expectations, it is important to develop mutually-agreed upon measures early on and put them in writing.

The Impact of Outsourcing Business

The Impact of Outsourcing Business, Jobs and Economies of Wealthy and Poor Nations.

The truth about the speed, scale and unstoppable momentum of business processoutsourcing and offshoring. What will be the net impact on the American and European economies? How should company executives and union leaders respond to emerging markets? Can or should the offshoring process be reversed? Advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing?

Outsourcing is very controversial and affects every part of business from manufacturing through to design, software development, financial control, logistics management, customer support and sales. Outsourcing has been praised as cost-effective, efficient, productive and strategic - but also condemned as evil, money-grabbing, destructive, ruthless, exploiting the poor.

China is now seeing 100% salary inflation at top end and India is not far behind - acute shortage of experienced business leadership. Some companies are now thinking of moving operations to places like Pakistan (50% lower costs and over 200,000 IT graduates looking for work), Bangladesh or Vietnam. Changes are happening very quickly.

Outsourcing can generate weeks of hostile media coverage, widespread protests and industrial action. The issue is so sensitive that decisions are usually taken behind closed doors at the most senior levels in the organisation, and only announced after much careful research into how the proposals are likely to be received.

However, If handled badly, business process outsourcing can damage corporate image, weaken a brand, unsettle customers, and result in lower quality of products and services. But when handled well, the results can be good enough to save a failing corporation.

Various reasons why organizations outsource

A precise definition of outsourcing has yet to be agreed upon. Thus, the term is used inconsistently. However, outsourcing is often viewed as involving the contracting out of a business function - commonly one previously performed in-house - to an external provider. In this sense, two organizations may enter a contractual agreement involving an exchange of services and payments. Of recent concern is the ability of businesses to outsource to suppliers outside the nation, sometimes referred to as offshoring or offshore outsourcing (which are odd terms because doing business with another country does not mean you have to go offshore^. In addition, several related terms have emerged to grasp various aspects of the complex relationship between economic organizations or networks, such as nearshoring, multisourcing and strategic outsourcing.
Organizations that outsource are seeking to realize benefits or address the following issues:

• Cost savings — The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, re-pricing, re-negotiation, cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring called "labor arbitrage" generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.
• Focus on Core Business — Resources (for example investment, people, infrastructure) are focused on developing the core business. For example often organizations outsource their IT support to specialised IT services companies.
• Cost restructuring — Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable.
• Improve quality — Achieve a steep change in quality through contracting out the service with a new service level agreement.
• Knowledge — Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge.
• Contract — Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.
• Operational expertise — Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house.
• Access to talent — Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills, in particular in science and engineering.
• Capacity management — An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier.
• Catalyst for change — An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process.
• Enhance capacity for innovation — Companies increasingly use external knowledge service providers to supplement limited in-house capacity for product innovation.
• Reduce time to market — The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier.
• Commodification — The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services, and application services which enable to buy at the right price, allows businesses access to services which were only available to large corporations.
• Risk management — An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation.
• Venture Capital — Some countries match government funds venture capital with private venture capital for start-ups that start businesses in their country^.
• Tax Benefit — Countries offer tax incentives to move manufacturing operations to counter high corporate taxes within another country.
• Scalability — The outsourced company will usually be prepared to manage a temporary or permanent increase or decrease in production.
• Creating leisure time — Individuals may wish to outsource their work in order to optimise their work-leisure balance

Interorganizational Systems and competitive advantages

Global business constantly faces radical transformations stemming from advances in information technology (IT). The concept of gaining competitive advantages by linking information systems across organizations (e.g., supply chain integration) has taken on an overtone of dogma in many business circles. Such electronic linkages are known as Interorganizational Systems (IOS). Lately, the growing importance and easy accessibility of the Internet have propelled IOS to a new height. Undoubtedly, IOS can have a great impact on organizational performance and industry structure. However, IT such as the Internet is readily available to all companies, and most IOS concepts can be easily replicated. Followers often enjoy newer and better technology that enables them to offer comparable services in a short time and possibly at a lower cost. Late adopters can also learn from the experience of innovators and thus avoid problems and hiccups along the way. How, then can organizations achieve competitive advantages from IOS?

There are number of successful IOS such as the SABRE reservations system from American Airlines, the Apollo reservations system from United Airlines, the ASAP Express from Baxter Healthcare Corporation, and the Wal-Mart Supply Chain system. These are some of the rare few that have managed to sustain competitive advantages (albeit some for a short period of time) as other companies installed similar electronic capabilities.

Two issues in Knowledge Sharing

In this week's presentations - Siemens and Care Group, we got to learn about two types of knowledge sharing

1. Knowledge sharing in a crowd level Vs. Knowledge sharing in an individual level - Siemens case
2. Knowledge sharing in a control environment Vs. knowledge sharing in a free environment - Care Group case

Siemens had its knowledge sharing through Share net. But the question is - can we really trust the information/knowledge that we can find there? As it is said that the crowd source knowledge may not be better than an individual-source knowledge especially when that individual is an expert in the particular field. However, in some cases, crowd-source knowledge could be better. In the class, Dr. Schwarz gave a really nice example of a t-shirt manufacturing company, which took inputs in designing from the real customers and produced the most liked designs.

Another issue - knowledge sharing in a control environment is better or knowledge sharing in a free environment? As we learned from the Care Group case study, that there was only one person who knew everything about the system and in his absence, the whole network was shut down because there was no one else who knew how to work with the system. Now, why did it happen? Here comes the issue with knowledge sharing - was KS not effective? Or was it not done in the proper manner? Would something like this would have happened if KS would was more in a free environment?

But whatever said, I do as well think more conservatively and agree with what Dr. Schwarz  said in the class - "I don't really believe in KM or KS". The simple reason being, can we trust the organization? Can we be so flexible about it that we dump our knowledge in the system and be of no value at all? Well, there could be many questions to be answered before i could actually take up KS.

Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
It’s not just you. It really is getting harder to outpace the other guys. Our recent research finds that since the middle of the 1990s, which marked the mainstream adoption of the internet and commercial enterprise software, competition within the U.S. economy has accelerated to unprecedented levels. There are a number of possible reasons for this quickening, including M&A activity, the opening up of global markets, and companies’ continuing R&D efforts. However, we found that a central catalyst in this shift is the massive increase in the power of IT investments.
To better understand when and where IT confers competitive advantage in today’s economy, we studied all publicly traded U.S. companies in all industries from the 1960s through 2005, looking at relevant performance indicators from each (including sales, earnings, profitability, and market capitalization) and found some striking patterns: Since the mid-1990s, a new competitive dynamic has emerged—greater gaps between the leaders and laggards in an industry, more concentrated and winner-take-all markets, and more churn among rivals in a sector. Strikingly, this pattern closely matches the turbulent “creative destruction” mode of capitalism that was first predicted over 60 years ago by economist Joseph Schumpeter. This accelerated competition has coincided with a sharp increase in the quantity and quality of IT investments, as more organizations have moved to bolster (or altogether replace) their existing operating models using the internet and enterprise software. Tellingly, the changes in competitive dynamics are most apparent in precisely those sectors that have spent the most on information technology, even when we controlled for other factors.
This pattern is a familiar one in markets for digitized products like computer software and music. Those industries have long been dominated by both a winner-take-all dynamic and high turbulence, as each group of dominant innovators is threatened by succeeding waves of innovation. Consider how quickly Google supplanted Yahoo, which supplanted AltaVista and others that created the search engine market from nothing. Or the relative speed with which new recording artists can dominate sales in a category.
Most industries have historically been fairly immune from this kind of Schumpeterian competition. However, our findings show that the internet and enterprise IT are now accelerating competition within traditional industries in the broader U.S. economy. Why? Not because more products are becoming digital but because more processes are: Just as a digital photo or a web-search algorithm can be endlessly replicated quickly and accurately by copying the underlying bits, a company’s unique business processes can now be propagated with much higher fidelity across the organization by embedding it in enterprise information technology. As a result, an innovator with a better way of doing things can scale up with unprecedented speed to dominate an industry. In response, a rival can roll out further process innovations throughout its product lines and geographic markets to recapture market share. Winners can win big and fast, but not necessarily for very long.
CVS, Cisco, and Otis Elevator are among the many companies we’ve observed gaining a market edge by competing on technology-enabled processes—carefully examining their working methods, revamping them in interesting ways, and using readily available enterprise software and networking technologies to spread these process changes to far-flung locations so they’re executed the same way every time.
In the following pages, we’ll explore why the link between technology and competition has become much stronger and tighter since the mid-1990s, and we’ll clarify the roles that business leaders and enterprise technologies should play in this new environment. Competing at such high speeds isn’t easy, and not everyone will be able to keep up. The senior executives who do may realize not only greatly improved business processes but also higher market share and increased market value.

How Technology Has Changed Competition

The mid-1990s marked a clear discontinuity in competitive dynamics and the start of a period of innovation in corporate IT, when the internet and enterprise software applications—like enterprise resource management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise content management (ECM)—became practical tools for business. Corporate investments in IT surged during this time—from about $3,500 spent per worker in 1994 to about $8,000 in 2005, according the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). (See the exhibit “The IT Surge.”) At the same time, annual productivity growth in U.S. companies roughly doubled, after plodding along at about 1.4% for nearly 20 years. Much attention has been paid to the connection between productivity growth and the increase in IT investment. But hardly any has been directed to the nature of the link between IT and competitiveness. That’s why, with help from Harvard Business School researcher Michael Sorell and Feng Zhu, who’s now an assistant professor at USC, we set out two years ago to compare the increase in IT spending with various measures of competition, focusing on three quantifiable indicators: concentration, turbulence, and performance spread.

Resistance to Change

		Overcoming Resistance to Change: Top Ten Reasons for Change Resistanceby A. J. Schuler, Psy. D. Top Ten Reasons People Resist Change: 1. THE RISK OF CHANGE IS SEEN AS GREATER THAN THE RISK OF STANDING STILL Making a change requires a kind of leap of faith:  you decide to move in the direction of the unknown on the promise that something will be better for you.  But you have no proof.  Taking that leap of faith is risky, and people will only take active steps toward the unknown if they genuinely believe – and perhaps more importantly, feel – that the risks of standing still are greater than those of moving forward in a new direction.  Making a change is all about managing risk.  If you are making the case for change, be sure to set out in stark, truthful terms why you believe the risk situation favors change.  Use numbers whenever you can, because we in the West pay attention to numbers.  At the very least, they get our attention, and then when the rational mind is engaged, the emotional mind (which is typically most decisive) can begin to grapple with the prospect of change.  But if you only sell your idea of change based on idealistic, unseen promises of reward, you won’t be nearly as effective in moving people to action.  The power of the human fight-or-flight response can be activated to fight for change, but that begins with the perception of risk. 2. PEOPLE FEEL CONNECTED TO OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE IDENTIFIED WITH THE OLD WAY We are a social species.  We become and like to remains connected to those we know, those who have taught us, those with whom we are familiar – even at times to our own detriment.  Loyalty certainly helped our ancestors hunt antelope and defend against the aggressions of hostile tribes, and so we are hard wired, I believe, to form emotional bonds of loyalty, generally speaking.  If you ask people in an organization to do things in a new way, as rational as that new way may seem to you, you will be setting yourself up against all that hard wiring, all those emotional connections to those who taught your audience the old way - and that’s not trivial.  At the very least, as you craft your change message, you should make statements that honor the work and contributions of those who brought such success to the organization in the past, because on a very human but seldom articulated level, your audience will feel asked to betray their former mentors (whether those people remain in the organization or not). A little good diplomacy at the outset can stave off a lot of resistance. 3. PEOPLE HAVE NO ROLE MODELS FOR THE NEW ACTIVITY Never underestimate the power of observational learning.  If you see yourself as a change agent, you probably are something of a dreamer, someone who uses the imagination to create new possibilities that do not currently exist.  Well, most people don’t operate that way.  It’s great to be a visionary, but communicating a vision is not enough. Get some people on board with your idea, so that you or they can demonstrate how the new way can work. Operationally, this can mean setting up effective pilot programs that model a change and work out the kinks before taking your innovation “on the road.”  For most people, seeing is believing.  Less rhetoric and more demonstration can go a long way toward overcoming resistance, changing people’s objections from the “It can’t be done!” variety to the “How can we get it done?” category. 4. PEOPLE FEAR THEY LACK THE COMPETENCE TO CHANGE This is a fear people will seldom admit.  But sometimes, change in organizations necessitates changes in skills, and some people will feel that they won’t be able to make the transition very well.  They don’t think they, as individuals, can do it.  The hard part is that some of them may be right.  But in many cases, their fears will be unfounded, and that’s why part of moving people toward change requires you to be an effective motivator.  Even more, a successful change campaign includes effective new training programs, typically staged from the broad to the specific.  By this I mean that initial events should be town-hall type information events, presenting the rationale and plan for change, specifying the next steps, outlining future communications channels for questions, etc., and specifying how people will learn the specifics of what will be required of them, from whom, and when.  Then, training programs must be implemented and evaluated over time.  In this way, you can minimize the initial fear of a lack of personal competence for change by showing how people will be brought to competence throughout the change process.  Then you have to deliver. 5. PEOPLE FEEL OVERLOADED AND OVERWHELMED Fatigue can really kill a change effort, for an individual or for an organization.  If, for example, you believe you should quit smoking, but you’ve got ten projects going and four kids to keep up with, it can be easy to put off your personal health improvement project (until your first heart attack or cancer scare, when suddenly the risks of standing still seem greater than the risks of change!).  When you’re introducing a change effort, be aware of fatigue as a factor in keeping people from moving forward, even if they are telling you they believe in the wisdom of your idea.  If an organization has been through a lot of upheaval, people may resist change just because they are tired and overwhelmed, perhaps at precisely the time when more radical change is most needed!  That’s when you need to do two things:  re-emphasize the risk scenario that forms the rationale for change (as in my cancer scare example), and also be very generous and continuously attentive with praise, and with understanding for people’s complaints, throughout the change process.  When you reemphasize the risk scenario, you’re activating people’s fears, the basic fight-or-flight response we all possess.  But that’s not enough, and fear can produce its own fatigue. You’ve got to motivate and praise accomplishments as well, and be patient enough to let people vent (without getting too caught up in attending to unproductive negativity). 6. PEOPLE HAVE A HEALTHY SKEPTICISM AND WANT TO BE SURE NEW IDEAS ARE SOUND It’s important to remember that few worthwhile changes are conceived in their final, best form at the outset.  Healthy skeptics perform an important social function:  to vet the change idea or process so that it can be improved upon along the road to becoming reality.  So listen to your skeptics, and pay attention, because some percentage of what they have to say will prompt genuine improvements to your change idea (even if some of the criticism you will hear will be based more on fear and anger than substance). 7. PEOPLE FEAR HIDDEN AGENDAS AMONG WOULD-BE REFORMERS Let’s face it, reformers can be a motley lot.  Not all are to be trusted.  Perhaps even more frightening, some of the worst atrocities modern history has known were begun by earnest people who really believed they knew what was best for everyone else.  Reformers, as a group, share a blemished past . . . And so, you can hardly blame those you might seek to move toward change for mistrusting your motives, or for thinking you have another agenda to follow shortly.  If you seek to promote change in an organization, not only can you expect to encounter resentment for upsetting the established order and for thinking you know better than everyone else, but you may also be suspected of wanted to increase your own power, or even eliminate potential opposition through later stages of change.  I saw this in a recent change management project for which I consulted, when management faced a lingering and inextinguishable suspicion in some quarters that the whole affair was a prelude to far-reaching layoffs.  It was not the case, but no amount of reason or reassurance sufficed to quell the fears of some people.  What’s the solution?  Well, you’d better be interested in change for the right reasons, and not for personal or factional advantage, if you want to minimize and overcome resistance. And you’d better be as open with information and communication as you possibly can be, without reacting unduly to accusations and provocations, in order to show your good faith, and your genuine interest in the greater good of the organization.  And if your change project will imply reductions in workforce, then be open about that and create an orderly process for outplacement and in-house retraining.  Avoid the drip-drip-drip of bad news coming out in stages, or through indirect communication or rumor.  Get as much information out there as fast as you can and create a process to allow everyone to move on and stay focused on the change effort. 8. PEOPLE FEEL THE PROPOSED CHANGE THREATENS THEIR NOTIONS OF THEMSELVES Sometimes change on the job gets right to a person’s sense of identity. When a factory worker begins to do less with her hands and more with the monitoring of automated instruments, she may lose her sense of herself as a craftsperson, and may genuinely feel that the very things that attracted her to the work in the first place have been lost. I saw this among many medical people and psychologists during my graduate training, as the structures of medical reimbursement in this country changed in favor of the insurance companies, HMO’s and managed care organizations.  Medical professionals felt they had less say in the treatment of their patients, and felt answerable to less well trained people in the insurance companies to approve treatments the doctors felt were necessary.  And so, the doctors felt they had lost control of their profession, and lost the ability to do what they thought best for patients.  My point is not to take sides in that argument, but to point out how change can get right to a person’s sense of identity, the sense of self as a professional.  As a result, people may feel that the intrinsic rewards that brought them to a particular line of work will be lost with the change.  And in some cases, they may be absolutely right. The only answer is to help people see and understand the new rewards that may come with a new work process, or to see how their own underlying sense of mission and values can still be realized under the new way of operating.  When resistance springs from these identity-related roots, it is deep and powerful, and to minimize its force, change leaders must be able to understand it and then address it, acknowledging that change does have costs, but also, (hopefully) larger benefits. 9. PEOPLE ANTICIPATE A LOSS OF STATUS OR QUALITY OF LIFE Real change reshuffles the deck a bit.  Reshuffling the deck can bring winners . . . and losers.  Some people, most likely, will gain in status, job security, quality of life, etc. with the proposed change, and some will likely lose a bit.  Change does not have to be a zero sum game, and change can (and should) bring more advantage to more people than disadvantage.  But we all live in the real world, and let’s face it – if there were no obstacles (read: people and their interests) aligned against change, then special efforts to promote change would be unnecessary.  Some people will, in part, be aligned against change because they will clearly, and in some cases correctly, view the change as being contrary to their interests.  There are various strategies for minimizing this, and for dealing with steadfast obstacles to change in the form of people and their interests, but the short answer for dealing with this problem is to do what you can to present the inevitability of the change given the risk landscape, and offer to help people to adjust. Having said that, I’ve never seen a real organizational change effort that did not result in some people choosing to leave the organization, and sometimes that’s best for all concerned. When the organization changes, it won’t be to everyone’s liking, and in that case, it’s best for everyone to be adult about it and move on. 10.  PEOPLE GENUINELY BELIEVE THAT THE PROPOSED CHANGE IS A BAD IDEA I’ll never forget what a supervisor of mine said to be, during the year after I had graduated from college, secure as I was in the knowledge of my well earned, pedigreed wisdom at age twenty-two.  We were in a meeting, and I made the comment, in response to some piece of information, “Oh, I didn’t know that!”  Ricky, my boss, looked at me sideways, and commented dryly, “Things you don’t know . . . fill libraries.”  The truth is, sometimes someone’s (even – gasp! – my) idea of change is just not a good idea.  Sometimes people are not being recalcitrant, or afraid, or muddle-headed, or nasty, or foolish when they resist.  They just see that we’re wrong. And even if we’re not all wrong, but only half wrong, or even if we’re right, it’s important not to ignore when people have genuine, rational reservations or objections.  Not all resistance is about emotion, in spite of this list I’ve assembled here.  To win people’s commitment for  change, you must engage them on both a rational level and an emotional level. I’ve emphasized the emotional side of the equation for this list because I find, in my experience, that this is the area would-be change agents understand least well.  But I’m also mindful that a failure to listen to and respond to people’s rational objections and beliefs is ultimately disrespectful to them, and to assume arrogantly that we innovative, change agent types really do know best.  A word to the wise:  we’re just as fallible as anyone.