Role of Information Technology in Organizations Fighting Eagle’s Quick Reference Notes Week 6 BA101 Introduction to Business •Brian Arthur, author of the book The Nature of Technology, believes that “more than anything else technology creates our world. Technology creates our wealth, our economy our way of being.” • Technology: • Allows us to look at the world differently to see beyond what is to what could be • Allows us to create innovative solutions • Allows organizations to operate with little manpower reducing the cost of doing business • Connects the organization to their distributors, their customers and their employees • Allows instantaneous access to information so organizations are better able to offer lower pricing of their products without having to sacrifice quality • Information technology, or IT is essential for organizations to efficiently conduct business. Four Most Important Roles of IT: Managing Communication • Email is the chosen form of communication for many businesses • Email provides an easy and low cost way for businesses to communicate with employees, distributors and customers. • The internet also allows businesses to communicate, advertise and sell their products to people around the world. Managing Inventory •Keeps track of the quantities of each product • Triggers an order when the amount falls below the pre-determined quantity in stock Managing Data • Storing of electronic versions of all documents • Instant availability of documents Managing Customer Relationships • Software used to help to improve how they manage relationships with customers • Software can record all interactions a business has with a customer BA101 Week 6 Lecture Welcome to week six. Let’s get started. Please select lessons, week 6 in the getting started folder. This week's learning objective is to understand the role information technology plays in organizations. Your activities this week included some reading of related articles, a lecture, and discussion question, and an assignment. Go ahead and print out the getting started page. It is always a good idea to do this. Keep it next to you - one of the things I like to do is check off each activity as I complete them to make sure that I have completed everything successfully for the week. So what is required of you this week? As in any way to be sure to read the material. Be sure to ask questions of your professor if you have any participate early and often in the discussion forums and complete your assignments focusing on completeness, timeliness, and professionalism. Let’s take a look at lecture one in week six which is the role of information technology in organizations. During this lecture we will discuss the role information technology plays in organizations. I'd like to begin our lecture by taking a minute to discuss technology in general. As long as there have been human beings on this planet there has been technology in ...

1. Role of Information Technology in Organizations
Fighting Eagle’s
Quick Reference Notes
Week 6
BA101 Introduction to Business
•Brian Arthur, author of the book The Nature of Technology,
believes that “more than anything
else technology creates our world. Technology creates our
wealth, our economy our way of
being.”
• Technology:
• Allows us to look at the world differently to see beyond what
is to what could be
• Allows us to create innovative solutions
• Allows organizations to operate with little manpower reducing
the cost of doing
business
• Connects the organization to their distributors, their customers
and their employees
• Allows instantaneous access to information so organizations
are better able to offer
lower pricing of their products without having to sacrifice
quality
• Information technology, or IT is essential for organizations to
efficiently conduct business.

2. Four Most Important Roles of IT:
Managing Communication • Email is the chosen form of
communication
for many businesses
• Email provides an easy and low cost way for
businesses to communicate with employees,
distributors and customers.
• The internet also allows businesses to
communicate, advertise and sell their
products to people around the world.
Managing Inventory •Keeps track of the quantities of each
product
• Triggers an order when the amount falls
below the pre-determined quantity in stock
Managing Data • Storing of electronic versions of all
documents
• Instant availability of documents
Managing Customer Relationships • Software used to help to
improve how they
manage relationships with customers
• Software can record all interactions a
business has with a customer
BA101 Week 6 Lecture
Welcome to week six. Let’s get started. Please select lessons,
week 6 in the getting started folder. This week's learning
objective is to understand the role information technology plays
in organizations. Your activities this week included some
reading of related articles, a lecture, and discussion question,
and an assignment. Go ahead and print out the getting started

3. page. It is always a good idea to do this. Keep it next to you -
one of the things I like to do is check off each activity as I
complete them to make sure that I have completed everything
successfully for the week. So what is required of you this week?
As in any way to be sure to read the material. Be sure to ask
questions of your professor if you have any participate early
and often in the discussion forums and complete your
assignments focusing on completeness, timeliness, and
professionalism.
Let’s take a look at lecture one in week six which is the role of
information technology in organizations. During this lecture we
will discuss the role information technology plays in
organizations. I'd like to begin our lecture by taking a minute to
discuss technology in general. As long as there have been
human beings on this planet there has been technology in some
way shape or form. Whether it was the cavemen carving and
shaping rocks to use as wheels or creating the first personal
computer technology, has driven the evolution of our species
and our civilization. According to Brian Arthur in his latest
book the nature of technology more than anything else
technology creates our world. It creates are wealth, our
economy, our very way of being. Think about this for just a
minute - wouldn't you agree when discussing technology is
often difficult to separate it from society as a whole.
Technology allows us to look at the world differently and to see
beyond what is, in a matter of speaking, compared to what could
be. this ability has allowed us to create innovative solutions and
technologies that have helped our society flourish through the
generations and well beyond what we ever thought were
imaginable. Is important for us to understand that when we are
first developing and exploring concepts we need to be creative
but yet keep in mind what is reasonable to create. It is this
exciting combination of creativity and reason that encourages us
to learn from our past mistakes, push boundaries that we think
we are not possible. And to dream future possibilities. Now let's

4. shift gears and discuss the basic role of information technology
in organization.
Information technology or IT as it is commonly referred to as
recently become essential for organizations to efficiently
conduct business. I don't care if you are global corporation that
maintains a room full of mainframe servers or a one-person
operation that owns a single computer - IT plays a role in how
efficiently you operate. From a very basic standpoint
technology helps organizations efficiently manage information
that is vital to their operation - from the flow of data to
employee records. Technology also allows organizations to
operate with little manpower which helps to lower the cost of
doing business. It connects the organization to their
distributors, their customers, and their employees. also because
of its ability to lower costs and allows instantaneous access to
information so organizations are better able to offer lower
pricing of their products without having to sacrifice quality.
There are countless reasons that IT is essential to business,
however for our purposes I think we'll just focus on four of the
most important roles of IT which are: managing communication,
and managing inventory, managing data and managing customer
relationships. Managing communication means e-mail is the
chosen format of communicating for many businesses and
provides an easy and low-cost way for businesses to
communicate with employees, distributors, and customers.
Managing inventory helps businesses manage their inventory by
keeping track of the quantities of each product they want to
keep in stock and will trigger an order when the amount falls
below the predetermined quantity. managing data means storing
electronic versions of all documents that are instantly available
for immediate access and managing customer relationship means
IT helping to improve how business manage relationships with
their customers by using software that will record all
interactions a business has with a customer.

5. Your course folder for week six has several articles that you're
to read, but one article is particularly interesting to me and that
is the one entitled “technology levels the business playing
field”. According to the small business administration small
businesses represent 99.7% of all firms. They create more than
half of the private nonfarm gross domestic product and may
create 60 to 80% of all new net jobs. When they think about the
economic impact of information technology the first companies
to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay,
Google, and Yahoo, but the biggest impact on the economy may
well show up in small and medium-size enterprises. The reason
is that information technology is a great leveler. As computers
get cheaper and more powerful and more connected
technologies that were only available to the Wall-Marts of the
world become available to the small fry. Think about the lowly
cash register there was a big innovation in the 1880s when
manufacturers added a bell that sounded when the money drawer
opens so owners would know when someone had access to the
cash but after that the technology barely changed for almost a
century. The big companies like Wal-Mart could use satellite
networks and mainframe computers to track purchases, manage
inventory, and track customer behavior, but the little retailer
had to do with the old account registers scrolling through the
paper tape in the evening by hand and punching numbers into an
adding machine to balance its books. Then, along came the
personal computer of the late 1980s cash registers have become
just another computer application that can add receipts,
compare sales with inventory, create order list - in short they
could do just about everything the big chains to do. In the 1990s
cash registers became network allowing the small stores to
download records in a form suitable for spreadsheet analysis
and accounting software. these intelligent cash registers allows
small companies to adopt business models that had previously
been available only to large enterprises and equipped with a
scanner a cash register could be used to verify the sale of each
item allowing customers and companies to share data on a

6. revenue with the supplier. Some ice cream manufacturers
effectively contract for space for freezer in a store and share the
revenue from purchases each time a sale is made.
Even the success of the big internet companies rests in large
part in the fact they have advertising for small companies.
Amazon, Google. And Yahoo all make it possible for small
businesses to reach out nationally and even globally markets
that was approved previously inaccessible. The Internet has not
just affected the selling side of small businesses; it is also
having a big impact on the production side. I recently went to
two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. One told me her software
company has six employees, two in the United States and four
New Delhi. The other started a company to develop applications
and services for mobile phones. His company has five
employees in the United States, eight in Spain, and two in Italy.
Both of these micro-multinational companies were pretty much
the same way using e-mail webpages, voice over Internet phone
services, and other Internet technology to coordinate their far-
flung operations. Just think, said one - my little six person
operation is now global business. American workers complain
about big businesses sending jobs offshore to India and China,
economists say that the benefits from international trade
outweigh the cost which is great as long as you're not one of the
costs.
Offshore work means something quite different to the micro-
multinationals. These companies simply would not exist without
access to foreign labor. If they succeed they will certainly hire
more American workers as they grow. The internationalization
of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus
for the American economy. It allows the small players to have
access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a
few years ago. It is no surprise that many of these small, high-
tech, international entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have
the contacts, the connections, and that most critical ingredient

7. the ambition to assemble the pieces needed start a business. It is
almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign
development team together without some strong connections on
the ground. Even large multinationals have found out that
outsourcing is not the panacea it was proclaimed to be.
Paradoxically it is easier for the micro-multinationals to deal
with the inconvenience of outsourcing that it is for the big
international corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do
things that big international corporations will not do - like
staying up until 11 PM and using cheap voice over Internet
technology rather than expensive international telephone
service. constant supervision constant communication and
constant coordination are necessary to make small business
grow, but it is just these things - the ability to supervise
communicate and coordinate a distance that it becomes so much
cheaper in the last 20 years. Big enterprises were the first to
reap the benefits of this technological progress but the impact
of information technology on small and medium-sized
enterprises may yet turn out to have the most impact on the
economy.
Congratulations on finishing all of the weekly readings and
activities for week six managing information, but to be truly
successful with this week and you need to complete the
discussion question as well as the assignment. The discussion
question this week is what is the impact that technology has had
on our society. And if you had a chance to listen to the article
technology levels the business playing field you’ll have a lot of
information that you can use in this particular discussion forum.
now remember there is a participation requirement that you
must submit your initial substantial reply by day five and you
need to reply two additional times to students and or your
instructor by day seven there is a word limit of 75 150 words
but that's just the minimum you can go over and please
remember that replies to fellow students such as I agree, good
job, way to go, I really understand – don’t count as one of your

8. responses. In Your assignment this week you are to identify
and discuss the evolution of information technology and the
impact that is has had on business if you're going to create a
PowerPoint presentation, to write a summary of an article for a
newsflash, or to research identifying discuss the evolution of
information technology and the impact it has had on business
for traditional paper. again please note that we're looking for
critical thinking were looking for analysis and evaluation
synthesis and summary if you need some help in putting
together these materials are papers. Please don't hesitate to go
to the location on the front page of your course where you can
go down scroll down a bit and you'll see that there is on that
page the online tutoring service from the student advising and
learning center. Also there’s free tutoring for US military
families at tutor.com. Also the APA style guide on the very
front of your course description. All of these can be very
helpful to you so please don't hesitate to take advantage of these
writing services. let tell you why - a lot of people say that they
haven't been in school for a long time maybe they have
forgotten how to write grammatically correct papers maybe they
never learned how to write a grammatically correct paper in the
first place or maybe they say they just don't like to write but
here's what I want you to know: you're going to need to learn to
communicate effectively as a manager or leader and part of that
communication style is effective writing and so getting help
today and building knowledge skills and abilities while you're
in college will be very beneficial to you as you graduate and try
to get another job in industry somewhere else because I can
assure you that wherever you go from here if you plan to be a
manager or leader you will need to communicate effectively
through the written word so get some help here, learn how to do
research, learn how to use APA style effectively take the time
to learn while you're in college so that when you graduate you
have this necessary skill that business is looking for, and one
final note if you do need extra time in finishing your assignment
please contact your professor in advance of being late and of

9. course if you have any questions please don't hesitate to get
with them and to ask them any questions that you may have
regarding the week six activities
BA101 Week 6 Lecture
Welcome to week six. Let’s get started. Please select lessons,
week 6 in the getting started folder. This week's learning
objective is to understand the role information technology plays
in organizations. Your activities this week included some
reading of related articles, a lecture, and discussion question,
and an assignment. Go ahead and print out the getting started
page. It is always a good idea to do this. Keep it next to you -
one of the things I like to do is check off each activity as I
complete them to make sure that I have completed everything
successfully for the week. So what is required of you this week?
As in any way to be sure to read the material. Be sure to ask
questions of your professor if you have any participate early
and often in the discussion forums and complete your
assignments focusing on completeness, timeliness, and
professionalism.
Let’s take a look at lecture one in week six which is the role of
information technology in organizations. During this lecture we
will discuss the role information technology plays in
organizations. I'd like to begin our lecture by taking a minute to
discuss technology in general. As long as there have been
human beings on this planet there has been technology in some
way shape or form. Whether it was the cavemen carving and
shaping rocks to use as wheels or creating the first personal
computer technology, has driven the evolution of our species
and our civilization. According to Brian Arthur in his latest
book the nature of technology more than anything else
technology creates our world. It creates are wealth, our

10. economy, our very way of being. Think about this for just a
minute - wouldn't you agree when discussing technology is
often difficult to separate it from society as a whole.
Technology allows us to look at the world differently and to see
beyond what is, in a matter of speaking, compared to what could
be. this ability has allowed us to create innovative solutions and
technologies that have helped our society flourish through the
generations and well beyond what we ever thought were
imaginable. Is important for us to understand that when we are
first developing and exploring concepts we need to be creative
but yet keep in mind what is reasonable to create. It is this
exciting combination of creativity and reason that encourages us
to learn from our past mistakes, push boundaries that we think
we are not possible. And to dream future possibilities. Now let's
shift gears and discuss the basic role of information technology
in organization.
Information technology or IT as it is commonly referred to as
recently become essential for organizations to efficiently
conduct business. I don't care if you are global corporation that
maintains a room full of mainframe servers or a one-person
operation that owns a single computer - IT plays a role in how
efficiently you operate. From a very basic standpoint
technology helps organizations efficiently manage information
that is vital to their operation - from the flow of data to
employee records. Technology also allows organizations to
operate with little manpower which helps to lower the cost of
doing business. It connects the organization to their
distributors, their customers, and their employees. also because
of its ability to lower costs and allows instantaneous access to
information so organizations are better able to offer lower
pricing of their products without having to sacrifice quality.
There are countless reasons that IT is essential to business,
however for our purposes I think we'll just focus on four of the
most important roles of IT which are: managing communication,
and managing inventory, managing data and managing customer

11. relationships. Managing communication means e-mail is the
chosen format of communicating for many businesses and
provides an easy and low-cost way for businesses to
communicate with employees, distributors, and customers.
Managing inventory helps businesses manage their inventory by
keeping track of the quantities of each product they want to
keep in stock and will trigger an order when the amount falls
below the predetermined quantity. managing data means storing
electronic versions of all documents that are instantly available
for immediate access and managing customer relationship means
IT helping to improve how business manage relationships with
their customers by using software that will record all
interactions a business has with a customer.
Your course folder for week six has several articles that you're
to read, but one article is particularly interesting to me and that
is the one entitled “technology levels the business playing
field”. According to the small business administration small
businesses represent 99.7% of all firms. They create more than
half of the private nonfarm gross domestic product and may
create 60 to 80% of all new net jobs. When they think about the
economic impact of information technology the first companies
to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay,
Google, and Yahoo, but the biggest impact on the economy may
well show up in small and medium-size enterprises. The reason
is that information technology is a great leveler. As computers
get cheaper and more powerful and more connected
technologies that were only available to the Wall-Marts of the
world become available to the small fry. Think about the lowly
cash register there was a big innovation in the 1880s when
manufacturers added a bell that sounded when the money drawer
opens so owners would know when someone had access to the
cash but after that the technology barely changed for almost a
century. The big companies like Wal-Mart could use satellite
networks and mainframe computers to track purchases, manage
inventory, and track customer behavior, but the little retailer

12. had to do with the old account registers scrolling through the
paper tape in the evening by hand and punching numbers into an
adding machine to balance its books. Then, along came the
personal computer of the late 1980s cash registers have become
just another computer application that can add receipts,
compare sales with inventory, create order list - in short they
could do just about everything the big chains to do. In the 1990s
cash registers became network allowing the small stores to
download records in a form suitable for spreadsheet analysis
and accounting software. these intelligent cash registers allows
small companies to adopt business models that had previously
been available only to large enterprises and equipped with a
scanner a cash register could be used to verify the sale of each
item allowing customers and companies to share data on a
revenue with the supplier. Some ice cream manufacturers
effectively contract for space for freezer in a store and share the
revenue from purchases each time a sale is made.
Even the success of the big internet companies rests in large
part in the fact they have advertising for small companies.
Amazon, Google. And Yahoo all make it possible for small
businesses to reach out nationally and even globally markets
that was approved previously inaccessible. The Internet has not
just affected the selling side of small businesses; it is also
having a big impact on the production side. I recently went to
two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. One told me her software
company has six employees, two in the United States and four
New Delhi. The other started a company to develop applications
and services for mobile phones. His company has five
employees in the United States, eight in Spain, and two in Italy.
Both of these micro-multinational companies were pretty much
the same way using e-mail webpages, voice over Internet phone
services, and other Internet technology to coordinate their far-
flung operations. Just think, said one - my little six person
operation is now global business. American workers complain
about big businesses sending jobs offshore to India and China,

13. economists say that the benefits from international trade
outweigh the cost which is great as long as you're not one of the
costs.
Offshore work means something quite different to the micro-
multinationals. These companies simply would not exist without
access to foreign labor. If they succeed they will certainly hire
more American workers as they grow. The internationalization
of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus
for the American economy. It allows the small players to have
access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a
few years ago. It is no surprise that many of these small, high-
tech, international entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have
the contacts, the connections, and that most critical ingredient
the ambition to assemble the pieces needed start a business. It is
almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign
development team together without some strong connections on
the ground. Even large multinationals have found out that
outsourcing is not the panacea it was proclaimed to be.
Paradoxically it is easier for the micro-multinationals to deal
with the inconvenience of outsourcing that it is for the big
international corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do
things that big international corporations will not do - like
staying up until 11 PM and using cheap voice over Internet
technology rather than expensive international telephone
service. constant supervision constant communication and
constant coordination are necessary to make small business
grow, but it is just these things - the ability to supervise
communicate and coordinate a distance that it becomes so much
cheaper in the last 20 years. Big enterprises were the first to
reap the benefits of this technological progress but the impact
of information technology on small and medium-sized
enterprises may yet turn out to have the most impact on the
economy.
Congratulations on finishing all of the weekly readings and

14. activities for week six managing information, but to be truly
successful with this week and you need to complete the
discussion question as well as the assignment. The discussion
question this week is what is the impact that technology has had
on our society. And if you had a chance to listen to the article
technology levels the business playing field you’ll have a lot of
information that you can use in this particular discussion forum.
now remember there is a participation requirement that you
must submit your initial substantial reply by day five and you
need to reply two additional times to students and or your
instructor by day seven there is a word limit of 75 150 words
but that's just the minimum you can go over and please
remember that replies to fellow students such as I agree, good
job, way to go, I really understand – don’t count as one of your
responses. In Your assignment this week you are to identify
and discuss the evolution of information technology and the
impact that is has had on business if you're going to create a
PowerPoint presentation, to write a summary of an article for a
newsflash, or to research identifying discuss the evolution of
information technology and the impact it has had on business
for traditional paper. again please note that we're looking for
critical thinking were looking for analysis and evaluation
synthesis and summary if you need some help in putting
together these materials are papers. Please don't hesitate to go
to the location on the front page of your course where you can
go down scroll down a bit and you'll see that there is on that
page the online tutoring service from the student advising and
learning center. Also there’s free tutoring for US military
families at tutor.com. Also the APA style guide on the very
front of your course description. All of these can be very
helpful to you so please don't hesitate to take advantage of these
writing services. let tell you why - a lot of people say that they
haven't been in school for a long time maybe they have
forgotten how to write grammatically correct papers maybe they
never learned how to write a grammatically correct paper in the
first place or maybe they say they just don't like to write but

15. here's what I want you to know: you're going to need to learn to
communicate effectively as a manager or leader and part of that
communication style is effective writing and so getting help
today and building knowledge skills and abilities while you're
in college will be very beneficial to you as you graduate and try
to get another job in industry somewhere else because I can
assure you that wherever you go from here if you plan to be a
manager or leader you will need to communicate effectively
through the written word so get some help here, learn how to do
research, learn how to use APA style effectively take the time
to learn while you're in college so that when you graduate you
have this necessary skill that business is looking for, and one
final note if you do need extra time in finishing your assignment
please contact your professor in advance of being late and of
course if you have any questions please don't hesitate to get
with them and to ask them any questions that you may have
regarding the week six activities