Business Pressures, Organizational Responses, and IT Support
Business Pressures:
The environment of business includes many factors, such as, social, legal, economic, and so on. These factors combine together and create what is called Business Pressure. There are three types of business pressures:
1- Market Pressures: generated by :
The global economy and strong competition: cost of labor is very important impact on the global market which most workers moved to countries that have low costs. Although higher labor costs are in developed countries, these countries provide lots of services for their labor. IT has helped to implement these services.
The changing nature of the workforce: workers have diversified through the periods; there are women, single parents and minorities’ employees. IT has helped people to work while they are at home and it has made the integration so easily.
Powerful customers: customers can control the market because they become more knowledgeable than before. They even use the internet to find out about the quality and the prices of the products. So, companies are trying their best to meet customer’s demand. Customer intimacy is part of customer relationship management which helps the company to maximize customer’s experience.
2- Technology Pressures: two major technology-related pressures:
Technological Innovation and Obsolescence: many companies fight to attract more customers, they come up with new ideas to take advantages from competition market. So, they started to create new products and making processes to innovate these products. These processes called creative tension.
Information Overload: the huge amount of information through the internet and any other telecommunication organizations. For managers, to be effective and efficiency, they must access and utilize these vast stores of data.
3- Societal/ political/ Legal pressures:
Social Responsibility: social issues are ranging from the physical environment of the organization and individual to education. So, lots of companies are spending more time or money to solve social problems and this called organizational social responsibility or individual social responsibility. IT has helped in this side by created organization of IT green. The main social problem is Digital Divide which shows the gap among people who are using information technology and people who are not. So, companies are trying to close this gap by producing suitable products from both.
Compliance with Government Regulations and Deregulation: many companies have businesses which related to health, safety, environmental control and equal opportunity. The process to be complaint is expensive and time-consuming. So, these organizations relay on IT to support and provide the information of complaint.
Protection against Terrorist Attacks: in competition environment, most companies face terrorist attack from others. So, IT helps these companies to protect themselves by providing security systems and possibly identifying pattern.
Ethical Issues: many organizations face the problems of employees’ behavior which can damage the picture of the organization. The usage of IT has helped to store customers’ data in private and public database. Even so, the process of monitoring has become more available.
Organizational Responses:
These responses are implementing by using the IT.
1- Strategic Systems: are the plans of the organization which provide benefits for increasing the profit and better negotiate to suppliers and attract customers. They use IT to help them achieving these benefits.
2- Customer Focus: organizations provide customer services to attract customers or keep them on hand or even loss them to other competitors. So they use IT and many process designs to keep the customer and make him happy, e.g. amazon website and Dell.
3- Make-to-Order and Mass Customization: the business problem is how companies manufacture customization good efficiently. So they find a solution by converting the process from mass production to customization production. Mass production is to produce large quantity of identical items but Customization production is to produce as customer’s order (make-to-order) to satisfy his needs.
4- E-Business and E-Commerce: most of organizations tend to manage their processes and data by using IT approach. Even they use it to manage the pressures.
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