The number of evidences pointing out to the importance of IT is insurmountable. The number is so many and strong that it would take even the greatest minds a hundred years to write down all its positive effects. Below are some of the fundamental or basic important effects of IT.
1. Leveling the playing field across the globe. With information technology, people can have access to the same information that may be 5,000 miles away from their area. Businessmen from Pakistan can have access to the information from the United States of America and vice-versa. With IT, people have the opportunity to gain knowledge and current information that were not easily available before the advent of the information technology. With IT, the world has become smaller and flatter than ever before and IT made it possible for everybody to compete at the global market at the same level.Gone are the days when these people only used outdated books, publications and other reference materials to fulfill their fields of interests and to improve their understanding of and competitiveness in various aspects of the business. With information technology, everybody is equal and has the capacity to be better each passing day.
2. Security. With information technology, individual information whether personal, medical and/or business are protected from possible thieves, fraud users and others. Since many of the information are now electronically saved or input, IT professionals have a number of ways to protect the person's information and they also have ways to track down those people who have engaged in fraudulent activities. With information technology, people and their information are safer than ever before. It is true that price of being in a developed society is that everyone or anybody has the capacity to steal individual's information but with IT, individuals' information are safe (most probably) at all times.
3. Efficiency. With IT, job responsibilities can now be completed faster than ever before, some in less than 1 hour and some in just one click of a button. The efficiency resulting from IT extends across all divisions of a company, like operations, finance, medical records, among others. One great example is in the accounting field. Accountants used to perform and complete journal entries and prepare financial statements using paper. But with the use of accounting softwares like Peach Tree and QuickBooks, accountants can easily enter transactions in the system and print out statements in a couple of minutes (based on my personal experience working in an accounting office). In a nutshell, the use of IT in everyday work helps companies decrease labor costs and increase company productivity and output. On the other hand, the use of IT helps individuals increase their competencies, productivity and time that they can use for other business purposes.
IT does not matter
It is true that a coin has two sides and the same concept applies to IT. Though IT has some of the most innovative and world-changing positive effects, it has negative effects as well, negative effects that are overshadowed by the positive effects, but nevertheless, exist. Below are some of the negative effects.
1. Utilization Cost of IT. The cost of utilizing IT for a company is not always the best course of action especially for those small businesses. In reality, small companies do not have the sufficient amount of resources (i.e. funds) to engage in information technology activities nor have the time and money to train their employees on IT. Nicholas G. Carr said, in his article entitled "IT doesn't matter?", that corporate IT spending consistently show that greater expenditures rarely translate into superior financial results. In fact, as he said, the opposite is true. Instead of spending funds for IT, small companies can use them in more important and profit-generating activities like business/product marketing, business development and research and development. Even if the companies or small companies have already invested time and money on IT, IT in itself needs to be maintained and updated from time to time. In my perspectives, with regard to the small companies, the costs borne by IT far outweigh its benefits.
2. Ethical Concerns attached to IT. Nowadays, a number of employees are being displaced from their jobs by machines as cheap and effecient alternative workers. These machines are the products of IT. Corporations, whose main responsibility is to maximize profit, would replace manpower with machine power to lessen labor costs and the taxes attached to them. Is it ethically reasonable to replace individuals with machines as workers? The simple answer is no. Why is it that nowadays, countries experience higher unemployment rates than ever before? It is partly because machines displace individuals as workers. This is the result of IT. Closer examination of the negative effects of IT would reveal that not only are workers geting affected but also the economies of every affected country in the form of high unemployment rate, lower purchasing power, decrease in demand versus supply, among others. In the end, it is not the corporations that get hurt, it is both the economy and the individuals.
3. Training. Instituting IT in the workplace requires employee training. The reality is that, unfortunately, not everybody has the ability to understand IT especially those who don't like IT or do not have background at all. Although some will learn and continue to show productivity and competitiveness, some will fall behind and will never recover. Since companies' workforce goal is to elevate the ability of their employees, instituting IT and training them would go against their goal. It will create more than just division of IT competitive individuals from the ones that are not. It will create animosity, difficulty, among others.
Whether we think that IT matters or not, we can all agree that the true importance of IT is seen and felt only by each individual. When Peter Pan stole food from Captain Hook to feed the homeless people, some said that what he did was wrong and some went the opposite way. Just like Peter Pan's choice of action and as I said earlier, there are always two sides of a coin and I believe that this time, the benefits of IT far outweigh the negative effects.
