prepare and submit a paper on it’s strategic business role.
Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on it’s strategic business role. IT implementation proves largely augmentative to competitive business advantage but also tends to expose businesses to unwanted risks. The greatest risk posed by IT stems from its greatest advantage – simpler and easier accessibility. Enhanced accessibility allows a business to be better connected but it also presents the risk of unwanted intrusions. Since most information in the IT regime is stored in digital formats on computers, it is far easier to pry into confidential information stored on a company’s servers. No matter how much the IT industry tries to beef up its security, loopholes will always remain as new information is discovered (Olsen, 2012).
Another risk posed by IT is the overwhelming dependence it creates in the organization. Typically when a business implements an IT regime, the most basic of functions are transferred over to computers citing their efficiency. However, in case these systems break down for any number of reasons, alternative methods of work are not available. Essentially, the overwhelming dependence on computing leaves an entire business stagnated when its IT infrastructure collapses. The recent problems caused by Hurricane Sandy to IT infrastructure speak volumes of the inadequacy of dealing with a failed IT system.
The argument presented above can be extended further to indicate that IT implementation tends to eliminate redundancies in a system. When business organizations are looking towards competitive advantage under the IT regime, they tend to remove system redundancies as a means of promoting efficiency. However, the results are not always desirable given also the fact that certain redundancies that are still left are open for computers to decide about. In the regime of human business affairs, computers cannot be expected to take onto ethical and moral dilemmas no matter how advanced fuzzy logic ends up becoming .(Warf & Stutz, 2007).
