Information technology has quickly become a core aspect of a business, no matter the size. It is what drives many of the incredible innovations we have seen over the past few decades including everything from checkout counters to customer relations management systems like Salesforce, which are at the heart of a growing number of businesses. It cannot go unsaid that IT is now a crutch in almost every business but how exactly has it been responsible for one of the largest business revolutions in history?
By now most people will be familiar with what IT actually is to some extent. Even without having the baseline knowledge of what the acronym entails people have certainly heard the term thrown around. IT is based on the creation and processing of data. Data then becomes useful information to us after it has been analysed and processed, usually in the form of algorithms that take the data as input and produce the useful information that we are looking for.
This is especially important for businesses because even the smallest business interacts with a large number of customers, and in doing so, end up producing tens and thousands of data points every day. This is important because without data points it is impossible to gauge the likes of revenue, costs, ROI and every other essential business building block under the sun. The difference is, what once was a manual task is now automated and processed by computers.
Every industry in the economy now has some way to utilise and take advantage of the industry-relevant data as a means to improve and optimise business objectives due to the emergence of the Information Technology sector.
Things such as customer behaviour can be modeled on individualised customer journeys to produce targeted incentives and advertisements. Corporate offices can have network-wide applications installed and removed as staff come and go, without hassle. Local cafes can track keywords specific to their venue and implement strategies that allow them to compete with big franchises. Even farmers now have apps and software services that keep them informed about weather conditions, soil conditions, and market information that is revolutionising the way one of humanity’s oldest professions is done.
Gone are the days of an entire floor dedicated to filing cabinets containing the analog, paper data points that a business had accumulated over several years or even decades. Now, software platforms in the cloud can keep track of everything digitally, making that entire floor’s worth of business data accessible in its entirety to powerful algorithms that a business can use to find new ways to make money or save on costs.
With the pace of which technology is evolving, it is fair to say that artificial intelligence is clearly on the horizon, and in many cases, the next breakthrough of how IT will revolutionise the modern-day workplace. Many businesses have already opted into using computer systems as they are more efficient and safer than human workers. This is very quickly growing past the manual labour side of things, and delving deeper into replacing the thinking worker. Examples of this have already been seen in marketing, e-commerce and business management, and this is just to name a few. No sector of the economy will go untouched as this technology continues to develop, not even the Information Technology sector itself.
However, over the years we have become increasingly reliant on our technology in our day-to-day lives. This is perhaps most noticeable in navigation. For example, when can you honestly say was the last time you used a roadmap to get to a new holiday destination or to get to your relative’s new house without the aid of a GPS? It is perhaps this faith that we place in technology that drives the revolution of business IT.
However, given how information technology can lull us into a sense of complacency, the greatest challenge of all for businesses going forward is knowing when algorithm-based decision-making is appropriate and when humans are better equipped to handle the challenge at hand.
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