Information and Commincation Technology (ICT)

The ICT function in an organisation often starts off as the responsibility of another department such as accounts.

In the past smaller organisations did not fully understand the complexity of IT.

The most computer literate person in the department became the IT expert and this often led to poor IT strategy.

Often each department developed its own computer system, resulting in complete incompatability of resources.

Nowadays, any reasonable sized company would now find it difficult to operate without computers or with such fragmented ICT provision.

Most recognise that a company wide ICT department is required to standardise equipment, procedures and to allow for a central control on costs.

ICT has grown to cover a range of communications and may itself be divided into sub divisions covering such areas as telecommunications, networking, intranet and maintainance (technicians).

In a manufacturing organisation ICT has been developed into the production area to such a degree that CAD/CAM sytems allow the design of a product to be linked to the manufacturing control.

Usually all departments in an organisation use IT but the biggest problem is how to control and apportion costs. 

Does a company operate each department as a cost centre responsible for its own running cost? 

If so how can an ICT department apportion costs to its internal customers? 

Should it charge for usage of application software, amount of data stored, amount of traffic generated on a network or on time.

The system needs to apportion cost in an accurate manner that truly reflects the usage of ICT provision.

(A robot in a manufacturing process will only be used in that process.
It could be considered unreasonable to share such costs with other departments, the planning department use CAD computer-aided-design so why should the accounts department share this cost?)

In such situations, rather than let inter-department rivalry occur each department is required to place a bid for their ICT requirements to the ICT Manager or senior management who would decide on how the ICT allocation of funds is shared out.

Benefits of ICT to Users

1. Improved accuracy.
2. More comprehensive services can be provided.
3. Better efficiency in improved speed of services provided.
4. New customer services.
   (Internet Web Page information/communication services.
   Company or product information for shareholders/customers and the latest trend towards e-commerce.)
5. Better company communications.
   (Intranet web page allowing for such management-staff communications as internal newspaper, company-wide information bulletins, staff handbooks, health and safety bulletins and e-mail.)
6. Improved marketing to larger audience. (Intranet)
7. Provide management information either not previously available, or available too late to be of any use, tighter financial control.
   (A well designed computer based stock control system allows for smaller stock levels to be held without compromising the production process.
   This releases valuable capital for use to develop other areas of the organisation.)
8. Reduced costs by greater productivity from staff supported by ICT.
9. It can improve safety and working conditions by removing staff from dangerous or unhealthy production processes.
10. Improving working conditions by carrying out repetative and boring routines.
11. Improved product design, quality control available.
12. Better quality built into a process.
13. Quality control.
14. Improved speed of transactions. 
    (Customer credit worthiness for a Switch/Credit card transaction can be checked in real time.)

Disadvantages of ICT to an Organisation

The disadvantages to an organisation that has fully committed itself to ICT, is that for all of the benefits enjoyed when the ICT equipment is working, the business often cannot function at all when the ICT equipment fails.

The till operator at a supermarket cannot handle the number of customers or the number of articles in a shopping basket if the EPOS terminal fails.

A power failure to the EPOS terminals can stop the supermarket trading.

A company needs to have contingency plans for such situations.

Some supermarkets will close their doors to new customers and a manager will quickly calculate a customers basket and offer to sell them the contents.

The offer is usually heavily biased in the customers favour so that they readily accept the bargain and customer loyalty/satisfaction is retained.

Trading is suspended until IT systems are restored.

In the case of other organisations they may provide uninturruptable power supplies or backing up procedures (mirroring onto another computer) sometimes at a completely different location to ensure that systems can continue operating.