Information and Communication Technology Impact on Economies

Information and Communication Technology, or ICT, presently has become a serious part of the economy. Nearly all companies and consumers use computers and the internet for economic purposes. Now the customer has a wider variety of stores and ways to purchase from. Items can be bought, customized, or even services can be ordered using the current level of technology today. The influence of ICT in different economies worldwide has rapidly increased within the past twenty years. Depending on the area or region, these advances show different results from computers, cell phones, to internet usage. 

While developing countries may not gain the benefits of stronger economies in ICT, there are advantages to trailing behind. The costs of staying on top of the latest technological advance has risen almost exponentially since the coming of the digital age. Weaker economies trailing in their level of technology available can afford a cheaper means of acquiring technology either through donations or purchases in bulk of unwanted items such as computers and cell phones that are outdated.

 

As you can see, the growth of convenient technologies skyrocketed throughout 1999-2009. I think it may be better for economies to wait a little for prices to drop to purchase the latest technological advances from microchips to supercomputers. We may not have the latest technology available at all times but some of us are content with what we have. I have an older model of a cell phone but I've resisted updating for years simply because I had no reason to. It works the same as the latest models and is compatible with everything I use it for. Do you think our economy should always do what it can to stay on top of the technology game? If you have a cell phone, is it the latest model and was it worth the cost to get it; or do you have an older one that you are happy with?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0048903#pone-0048903-g001

The Painful Transitioning of IT

http://govcentral.monster.com/benefits/articles/4616-transition-hottest-jobs-majors-and-agencies


article: http://forumblog.org/2012/10/king-ludd-is-still-dead/


Some say technology is replacing workers and others say technology is not. Which one is it?

Kenneth Rogoff thinks it is both. He states, "Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, worldwide, technological change could easily lead to the loss of 5-10 million jobs each year. Fortunately, until now, market economies have proved stunningly flexible in absorbing the impact of these changes." He also states how even though people may lose their jobs, they just need to continue to look for different jobs even though the transition and process is a painful one. I see "painful" as having to invest money to educate and retrain yourself. The process may be time-consuming and you may have to make ends meet with finances. As humans, we stick to routines, systems, and traditions so I can imagine the difficulty to adapt to new strategies to be a more desirable candidate or employee.

Technology is actually broadening the markets and making it possible to reach more consumers. The hard part for firms is the transitioning. The rapid shift to technology may have hit some unprepared firms too forcefully. Firms are constantly competing to have that upper edge to produce at a lower cost and outsourcing and technology has allowed firms to find multiple ways to do so. However, firms that haven't invested in technology are having difficulty finding ways to lower costs and to keep up with the rest of the firms.Some even go out of business.

What are some strategies you can think of that may help firms or workers adapt to technological changes?

The Korean Economy and Information Technology

     Due to the recent adoption of information technology in Korea, the economy of this country has strengthened significantly. (For the statistics, please see the following link:  http://www.unescap.org/drpad/panel/hwang/HWANG.htm). They are not stopping, however, with where they are now. Korea has implemented a new policy to use information technology to create what they are calling "Cyber Korea 21" which is basically a new society for the country based on knowledge and information. The government is creating new jobs by reinforcing the information infrastructure, increasing the national productivity, and helping out new businesses.

     Something interesting that I found was that Korea is implementing computer courses for over ten million students as well as civil servants and those in the military service in order to create a "society without 'information-have-nots'". While it may seem as if they are using information technology to destroy tedious, repetitive jobs, they are giving those who are occupying those jobs a chance to move up instead of just leaving them on their own. They are eliminating jobs, but creating more in their places.

     Since 1995, the Korean economy has been growing due to information technology and they seem to have a pretty good plan to continue this trend. How are other economies growing due to their implementation of information technology? In what ways could information technology be detrimental to those economies or even the Korean economy?

http://www.unescap.org/drpad/panel/hwang/HWANG.htm

When Did Technology First Impact Employment?

The rise of technology has no doubt been overtaking jobs and employment opportunities for longer than any of us have been around. Some say that this phenomenon started during the Great Depression. People were losing jobs faster than they knew and some of this was due to the upcoming technology such as in a manufacturing type setting. It was easier and more productive to implement the use of the technology as opposed to using human workers. People began to realize that unemployment and the rise of productivity were somehow correlated due to technology.

                This problem however, was not as serious as it is today and it did not last long. Soon after the Great Depression, World War II began and the technology destroying jobs issue was thrown out the door, everyone was needed to get through this time any technological advances were thought of as a leg up on the enemy. But as soon as this war ended the issue was brought up again.

                While there are many statistics on when technology first became more productive and efficient than human workers, when do you think that it first became a serious issue for our economy? Did it happen before the Great Depression or even after World War II?

http://www.northeastern.edu/socant/wp-content/uploads/Handel-IT_Final.pdf

The New Music Industry

It’s a really good example of how advances in IT can completely change an industry. It might be one of the best examples. It has microeconomic and employment implications within the industry itself and broader effects in how consumers ultimately use the new technologies available to them. So let’s do a case study of sorts using the music industry. And I think most people should be able to relate to this in one way or another.

The groundwork for the massive change within the music industry probably started when Napster first allowed people to download free music from the internet. If anyone doesn’t remember what happened with Napster, read here:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-free-file-sharing

A few years later, Apple introduced the iPod, made some deals and got some licenses from the record labels, and now users have easy access to cheap music online. After Napster, it was inevitable. Now there are plenty of options for people to get music online.

So before the digital music era, everyone who wanted to get the music they wanted had to go to a store and do something like this: 

(source:  http://phatbootyent.com)

Now all you need to do is go on the interweb and search for whatever music you’d like to hear, and it will most likely be readily available to you. And it offers consumers a much broader and easier access to listen to new music. This in effect creates greater competition between the musicians themselves and decreases the barriers of entry for new musicians. A Rolling Stone article has Amanda Palmer, former singer and keyboardist of the Dresden Dolls, use the term “working-class musician” to describe the new environment of the music industry. You can read that article here: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/survival-of-the-fittest-in-the-new-music-industry-20121108

Of course the record companies themselves were the biggest losers. You could argue artists may have been negatively impacted from losing the revenue from record sales, but like the Rolling Stone article says, record sales were never a huge factor in the artist’s incomes. If anything, social media has now provided musicians with a greater benefit than what they previously would have gained in physical record sales. The biggest winners in this new market are of course the consumers. And someone has to design, build, and maintain all of the IT systems involved in making this digital market work, so new jobs were created outside of the music industry.

So is the music industry better off because of the new digital environment? I guess it depends how you look at it. Either way, it definitely has changed. And like the saying goes, it isn’t the strongest or smartest that survive, it is those most adaptable to change.

IT Influences the Economy

When the idea of using information technology was first introduced, companies were skeptical. Companies did not rely too much on information technology for the success of the organization.  In the past, companies only invested a small portion of their budget towards IT. Over the span of 40 years, the budget for information technology has increased. This increase is due to the fact that companies became aware of the significant profits that IT contributed to for the organization.

(Source: http://www.therefinishingtouch.com/blog/2008_12_01_archive.html)

 
According to the summary article The Economic Impacts of Information Technology, "the most effective companies have reorganized the way they make decisions, interact with customers and suppliers, and innovate to take advantage of the digital revolution, creating trillions of dollars of intangible organizational assets in the process." This means that companies use information technology in all parts of the organization to increase its profits. Due to this increased profits in organizations, IT has contributed to the economic growth of the United States overall.

http://www.cra.org/ccc/files/docs/nitrdsymposium/onepagers/brynjolfsson-summary.pdf
http://www.therefinishingtouch.com/blog/2008_12_01_archive.html

How IT Impacts Employees

Most employees work in the same environment every single day, so it only makes sense that if IT is involved in their workplace then it affects how the employees work. Some say that information technology is detrimental to the work place. They believe that the disadvantages that IT gives to the employees outweighs the advantages of IT. On the other hand, some believe that IT is good for the employees and enriches their job environment. To balance these opinions with equal critic, information technology can be separated into two different categories.

The first category is automated technology. Automating technology eliminates the human skills that are needed to complete certain work processes. This decreases the need for employees in that working area, and therefore employers are hiring a little bit or none at all for those working environments. This type of IT also demoralizes current and potential employees because they are unaware of when automated technology will make them unnecessary. The automated technology allows employers to question how far are they willing to make their organization rely on IT instead of human labor?

(source:future-research.com/infoTech)

 The second type of IT is informated. The purpose of informating technology is to enrich the work processes. This is an advantage to employees and employers. In this case information technology will remove repetitive tasks which will allow employees to be more productive in their work process. Due to the presence of this type of IT, employment will be affected by how creative and intellectual an employee is. Will this mean that in order to seek for employment, a person needs to know how to work out problems without specified rules? How can we challenge ourselves so that we rise above IT and bring in positive results?

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1151&context=cahrswp

http://www.future-research.com/infoTech.html

The Risk of Using Social Media for Hiring

Social media can be a very useful tool for employers in the hiring process. It provides much information that is unavailable through other hiring processes. However, firms have to be very careful about how they gather this information. There are many pitfalls that must be avoided, particularly discrimination charges. When employers access social media sites, they have access to lots of protected information they may not be able to get otherwise, such as religion, political views, and disabilities. Firms have to be careful to avoid using this information to disqualify candidates or make important hiring decisions. Also, firms must consider the timing in which they access social media sites. It is often more acceptable to look up candidates on Facebook or LinkedIn after you have had a face-to-face interview with them. One more issue with using social media is that some personal information you need explicit permission from a candidate to gain access to, such as when an employer does a credit check before hiring someone.

Another drawback of using social media for recruiting is that the candidate pool is not representative of the U.S. population. Studies have found that the percentage of Latinos and African Americans who use popular sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, is much lower than the actual proportion of these ethnicities in America. In order to reach these candidates companies must turn to other form of recruitment, such as magazines and website ads. They should also clearly display the fact that they are equal opportunity employers and are looking for diverse applicants on their websites.

So how do you feel about using social media in hiring? If you were running your own company would you employ this practice? Do the risks outweigh the benefits? And what are some ways you think companies could help protect themselves against lawsuits and build good policies on social media?

http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/technology/articles/pages/be-smart-when-using-social-media-for-hiring.aspx

Where IT Impacts

Where IT Impacts

I strongly believe that technology will not replace humans in the work force although it will change employment and the workplace. With that said, I strongly agree with David Autor and David Dorn’s content in their article “How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class.” They did a splendid job with observing the impacts of IT. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/how-technology-wrecks-the-middle-class/?_r=0

They touched on how technology saves many companies from hiring labor; however, at the same time technology is displacing many labor workers. Although these advanced machines are adopted to increase production, they still need workers to handle them so our labor workers become operators. However, it doesn’t take a whole team on the assembly line to monitor one machine so not everyone gets the job as an operator.

Information technology replaces a lot of the manual processes and production processes like organizing, sorting, and retrieving which leaves us with the “non-routine” jobs. These non-routine jobs are usually saved for the higher level employees like the managers, professionals, and technical people. The authors remind us how these people are the people with higher levels of education needed to analyze the data computed from IT. The article states how only 40% of Americans enroll in a four-year college after high school and more than 30% of those students don’t even graduate with a degree.

Overall, IT is not replacing jobs but how jobs are being performed by workers. The highly educated workers are benefitting most from the technological advances. Some labor jobs such as truck drivers and cooks are not necessarily threatened by IT. It is really the middle class jobs that are having a hard time with the rise of IT.

The authors and I agree that the best way to respond to the impacts of IT is to continue our education. Nowadays employers don’t want to provide training but are looking for trained and knowledgeable workers.  Even if you don’t want an IT job, many, if not all, companies do work with some kind of IT system so it doesn’t hurt to prepare yourself. If you are still waiting for the best time to invest in building your IT foundation, don’t you think the time is now?

The Difference IT Makes

The Difference IT Makes

Being a business student and hearing about how efficient and cost-effective technology is for businesses and organizations, I’m like... MUST have the SECRET FORMULA (*IT Knowledge)!

 http://karen-plankton.tumblr.com/

I feel like IT is similar to a second language. The second language doesn't replace your native language but instead it drastically increases your opportunities. Thus, being well-versed in IT just enhances and builds your skills and abilities making you a better asset to the company or improves your employment prospects.

Now the desire to learn is there...so how does technology specifically save on costs and improve systems?

http://is.unl.edu/pma/about-it-cost-reducing-task-force

Here is an example of how informational technology benefits its users. In the linked article below, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) discusses specifically how unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) save time, money and lives.

http://epic.org/events/UAS-Uses-Saving-Time-Saving-Money-Saving-Lives.pdf

According to this article, unmanned aircraft systems enhance public safety, aid in the recovery of disasters, protect the environment, enable scientific research, and boost agricultural production. AUVSI gives the example of how fire departments use UAS to detect hot spots and provide awareness of the situation. By obtaining this information more quickly, fire fighters can work and deal with fire faster and more efficiently with a clearer view of the whole situation. In 2012, 33% of firefighter deaths by nature of injury occurred on fire ground. (Source: http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/Files/Research/ NFPA%20reports/Fire%20service%20statistics/osfff.pdf). Imagine how UAS can reduce the death rate of our responders! Not only is it less risky, it is also cheaper to use unmanned aircraft system with direct operational cost of $3.36 per hour than to use a manned aircraft at a cost of $250-600 per hour. Wow!

UAS are also practical in other hazardous situations like nuclear power plant leaks and volcano eruptions. UAS can detect stranded people faster than emergency responders and can also capture data for research, rescue, and planning purposes.  These systems can help us reduce the risk of losing our talented people and expensive equipment when conducting research and working in these dangerous environments.

Overall, UAS prevent calamities by providing us with more accurate data to make predictions and preparations and help us recuperate more quickly from misfortunes.

After reading about UAS, doesn’t it make you think of all the different ways you can improve systems with IT? It makes me imagine scenarios like how IT or Information Systems can benefit a growing business with traditional filing system, a large corporation with potential cost reductions, or an organization that follows trends and needs real-time information. It’s amazing how much technology can provide...saves on time and money, improves business processes, boosts economy, and the list continues!

Is Technology Destroying Jobs?

Please read up until the “New Economy?” section of the following link:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

Rotman seems to think that we are not able to keep up with the ever-growing field of technology and that because of this we have fallen prey to a reduction in the demand for many different types of human workers. I think that we are losing a lot of jobs to the new technology, but not quite to the extent that Rotman sees it. We created the technology knowing what it had the capabilities of doing and most companies have implemented it because it is, in the long run, cheaper and more efficient.

While the new technology may be destroying certain areas of jobs, it is also creating some as well; although, they may be higher level jobs than those being destroyed (for example some created would be those who are actually developing the technology and some destroyed would be factory workers). While he does show a significant amount of evidence, I do not think that technology is as detrimental as it is made out to be in Rotman’s article. 

Later on  in the article, Rotman mentions some of the different types of robots that are used in different types of work settings. Two of the robots mentioned, Baxter (left) and Kiva (right), are simply meant to do the work that no one else wants to do. Their purpose ranges from retrieving things from a large warehouse setting to smaller, repetitive work. This is a prime example of how new technology is being used to not necessarily take the place of human workers, but to help them and make their jobs easier.

     

Are there any other reasons behind the fact that new technology is taking the place of many human workers? Also, do you think that technology is growing at a faster rate than we are able to keep up with?

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/rethink-robotics-baxter-robot-factory-worker
http://teachthe4ps.com/place/kivas-robot-army-helps-run-warehouses/

Why IT is Awesome

There are two things I've found to be really difficult as a college student. The first thing is somehow staying motivated and energized in all of my classes, especially when things start getting crazy towards the middle and end of the semester. It seems like of all of my teachers get together and purposely have every test for each of my classes scheduled on the same day every semester. To help you understand what I mean, this meme should explain things:

(source: imgur.com/8pOpe)

The second thing I've found really difficult is somehow engaging the other students whenever giving a presentation. A lot of the other students probably have a thousand things on their minds too, so getting their attention isn't exactly easy. And right now, I'm running into that difficulty again. How do you make a topic like the economic and employment impact of information technology interesting? Well, I ran into this nugget of info about the jobs IT creates. It seems pretty relevant:

- In 2011, IT workers earned $78,584 a year, 74 percent more than the

average worker ($45,230).

The source of that info is an article called "Just the Facts: The Economic Benefits of Information and Communications Technology" by Robert D. Atkinson and Luke A. Stewart. It can be found here: http://www2.itif.org/2013-tech-economy-memo.pdf. It mentions some other interesting things too, and I'll get to a few of those soon.

So when I hear about the average worker in a field earning $78,584 a year, I start to think about what job I'm going to get after graduating. Then I think that I'll be making that kind of money in that job. Then I start to feel like this:

(source: bretcontreras.com)

Then I come back to reality and realize I'll probably feel like this after graduation:

(Source: njscpa.org)

So anyway, it's at least nice to know those jobs are available. That article I cited earlier mentions that there are quite a few of those jobs out there and they are still being created. Here are a couple of points it brings up:

- Between 2001 and 2011, over 565,000 IT-related jobs were created (in all industries) in the U.S., an increase of 22.2 percent. IT jobs grew more than 95 times faster than employment as a whole, which grew by only 0.2 percent.

- Increased investments in IT actually lead to more, not less, job creation. U.S. corporations that invested more in IT expanded their workforces by 14 percent between 2006 and 2010, while the average increase of Fortune 500 firms that invested less in IT increased employment just 6 percent.

Reading stuff like this makes me a bit more hopeful about whatever job or career I may find myself in after graduation. Even if I don't work directly in IT, it's good to see jobs are actually being created so I don't have to compete relentlessly for, what in all likelihood will be, an entry level position. 

It's also nice to think that one day I'll be paid for doing work, as opposed to paying someone else to do work like I'm doing right now in college. Seriously, has anyone else thought about that before?