Information Technology Report: Networks, Ethics and IT in Management

This report provides a comprehensive overview of information technology, focusing on its social and ethical implications, various network types, and its role in management. The report delves into key social and ethical issues such as privacy, security, communication, content, operations, free speech,...Read More

INTRODUCTION IN IT

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Task 1...............................................................................................................................................1
Social and ethical issues associated with technology.............................................................1
Task 2...............................................................................................................................................3
Different types of network......................................................................................................3
Task 3...............................................................................................................................................4
Role of information technology in management....................................................................4
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................7
Books and Journals.................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Information technology is the usage of computer systems or any other technology for
storing, transmitting, retrieving or manipulating information or data often in terms of business or
organization. IT is being used in many companies nowadays in many of their operations. But use
of technology has also created some issues within the organization(Laudon, 2016). This
assignment will lay emphasis on all the social and ethical issues associated with the technology,
different types of network and use of information technology in management. All these topics
will be discussed in details in this assignment.
Task 1
Social and ethical issues associated with technology
There are many social and ethical issues associated with technology
 Privacy: Individuals privacy is one of the area which has been identified as a base for
unethical business behaviour through different technologies. Companies can track buying
habits, internet usage, personal information as well as all the individual movements of
their clients as well as their customers. Government has passed an act in which they have
individuals to restrict the collection of data and have some control over what companies
store and collect but still personal information of an individual is being compromised.
 Security: Organizations in the name of security monitor and collect much additional
information then required of employees and visitors. Ethical issues arises when activities
of employees are continuously monitored and recorded through security cameras(Xiang,
Magnini and Fesenmaier, 2015). This unjustified level of surveillance is ethically
questionable. All the companies must maintain a level of justification which is ethical
especially for non-employees such as visitors.
 Communication: There are many companies who monitors text- based digital
communications such as emails. These organizations scan millions of text and their
sender's message which is also unethical as they scan these messages without an explicit
agreement of employees.
 Content: With new technologies' creation and distribution of videos and images has been
made easy. Without any guideline companies or individuals uses contents that are
available on internet without anyone's permission. This sometime offends some
companies employees or individuals. Companies should maintain some standards which
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does not crosses their ethics and should respect privacy of other companies or individuals
personal contents.
 Operations: Companies that enter into a foreign market develop some local operations
over there which might be illegal or immoral at their home land. These organizations
should maintain some standards and provide safe working conditions and environment,
pay living wedges or salaries, should limit environmental impacts etc. and should
maintain such standards while operating in a foreign land for business (Huang and et.al,
2017). Many small companies compromise with these standards when they operate in
another country for the sake of profitability.
 Free Speech: It is also another social issue that many companies had addresses in terms
of their employee's or their potential customers or clients freedom of expression. Many
companies has already imposed legal sanction of many companies or individuals for
being involved in forbidden communication. Therefore, many companies think twice for
operating in such environment. In fact there are many organizations also that terminates
their employees if they are found doing negative publicity of their company.
 Bribery: It is illegal in many countries to offer bribe, which all the companies need to
accept. But still there are many companies that accept gifts, favours, communications or
ask for large amount for influencing a decision. It is also one of the biggest social issue
that companies are facing. Advancement in technology has also given rise to these type
of social issues in some organizations. Companies should set some policies and standards
and enforce guidelines regarding the same for reducing all the acts related to bribery.
 Marketing:Nowadays there are many technologies or platform through which companies
can do marketing of their products as well as of services they provide. Many
organizations do not consider ethics when they do marketing of their services or products
which sometimes collide with their own ethics and standards. These companies should
understand their moral social responsibilities and then use this marketing power for the
benefit of their brand.
 Taxes: Every organization need to pay government some tax for operating within that
country and even for importing some machinery. Sometimes those companies does tax
theft to make profit and doesn't pay complete tax to the government (Gatys, Ecker and
Bethge, 2016). This is also a serious social issue that many companies does for making
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revenue and crosses all the lines while operating in a foreign market as well as in their
home land.
Task 2
Different types of network
There are different types of network:
 Personal Area network: It is the smallest and the most basic type of network which is
organized around a single person in a building. It is also called PAN and made up of a
computer or two, wireless modem, printers, phones, tablets etc. This type of network is
mostly used in residences or small offices and are managed by one person or organization
from a single device.
 Local Area Network: It is also called LAN and are the most frequently used and
discussed networks. It is the most original and simplest type of network. It connects many
computers and low voltage devices together within a short distance within a building or
group of buildings close to each other and are used to share information and resources.
Ownership of this network is private and speed is high. It is based on wired connections
for increased speed and security. It has more fault tolerance and less congestion. It is
mostly used in schools, colleges, hospitals etc.
 Wireless Local Area network: It is a type of local area network also known as WLAN.
It used wireless network technology and is entirely wireless for example: Wi-Fi for
increased speed and relatively lower cost than LAN (Obar and Wildman, 2015). It is
mostly used in same type of applications like LAN. It doesn't require relaying on any
type of physical cables to the network.
 Campus Area network: It is a bit larger than LAN but smaller than metropolitan
network and is also known as CAM. It is mostly used in universities or larger district
schools or in small business. This network can be spread across several buildings that are
fairly close to each other so that users can share resources.
 Metropolitan Area Network: this type of network are larger than LAN but smaller than
wide area network but it incorporates elements of both the types of network and is called
MAN. It covers normally larger regions like towns or cities etc. Ownership of this
network can either be handled by a single person or by a company i.e. it can either be
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private of public. Fault tolerance of this network is less but congestion is more. It is often
used to connect several LAN's to form a larger network.
 Wide Area network: It is a bit more complex than LAN and connects several computers
together across longer physical distances. It mostly spans large locality and connects
countries or continents together. Ownership of this type of network can either be private
or public. Internet is one of the most basic example of WAN which connects all the
computers together around the world. As it has a vast reach it is mostly maintained and
owned by multiple administrations or public(Newell. and Marabelli, 2015).
 Storage Area network: it is also called high speed network or SAN that connects shared
pool of storage devices together to many networks as well as they do not rely on LAN or
WAN. This network moves storage resources away from the network and places then into
their own high-performance network. It can be accessed in the same way as a pen-drive
or driver is attached to the server.
 System Area Network: It is a new term that came into existence within past few
decades. It is normally used to provide high speed connection within a local network in
server to server applications or processor to processor applications. Systems connected on
this network are operated as a single system at a very high speed.
 Enterprise private network: This type of network is owned and build by organizations
that want to securely connect their locations to a common computer resources.
Task 3
Role of information technology in management
Use of information technology is important in management for managers. It has become a
main vital component and an integral part for success of any organization of business.
Information technology in management is used in various ways to benefit the business like:
 Communication: Internal communication within an organization between employees,
employers, staff members, customers etc. is one of the most important part in a company.
Many companies uses various ways of communicating out of which emails are the most
common Information technology way of connection (Brotchie and et.al, 2017). Many
organizations use their own mail servers. There is another way of doing communication
in business that is through portals. Many organizations have their own portals through
which they send messages or communicate with each other. Today information
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technology has made it possible to send messages to many simultaneously in different
ways like through portals, emails etc.
 Inventory management: It also one of the most important task in business. Use of IT has
made it possible to manage inventory of an organization i.e. to manage enough stock to
meet customers demand without investing more than required on the stock. It also helps
management in tracking the quantity of all the items present in the company and if
additional stock is required then it triggers to order additional items with pre determined
amount. There are many MIS systems that can be used for this like point-of-sales system.
This POS system ensures that whenever an item is sold it is removed from inventory and
keep a count of all the unit present(Vayena and et.al, 2015).
 Customer relationship management: many organizations uses IT to improve the way
they manage and design customer relationships. For this the most common system used is
Customer relationship management system (CRM). It captures all the interaction a
company has with their customers is captured to enhance the experience of customers as
much as possible. If any client calls customer-care service for a problem then this system
helps the representative to view the details of the customers with their past and present
purchases, shipping information and payment method. This helps the companies to
resolve the issue that customer is facing and if they face any other issue in future then
their problems can be solved quickly and efficiently. This enables the customers to buy
that companies product and call again in case it is needed and company can benefit from
this and improve their productivity.
 Manage human resource: A business cannot operate successfully if they do not have
any experienced employees. IT enables the organization to use HRM to manage their
employees as well as recruit more experienced workers. Many companies have their job
portals where they post for the job vacancy to get applications of applicants. These
portals enable candidates to upload their resume and related documents for recruiter so
that all the applicable applications can be selected and rest can be rejected. It is a very
much cost efficient and time saving method for companies (Patterson, Wilkins and
Painter, 2018).
 Management information system: Benefits of storing can only be seen if the
information is stored securely and can be used efficiently. Companies uses MIS systems
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to track sales data, productivity level and expenses. This information can be used to track
the profitability over time to maximize the return and profit and can also help in
identifying improvement areas in the business on daily basis(Gekas and et.al, 2016).
CONCLUSION
From this assignment it has been concluded that this use of technology has also created
some social and ethical issues with the organizations. All the unethical and unsocial practices are
being done in the companies frequently in different ways. Assignment had also discussed
different types of networks available and their usage in details as well as use of information
technology in management in details.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Brotchie, J., and et.al., 2017. The future of urban form: the impact of new technology. Routledge.
Gatys, L.A., Ecker, A.S. and Bethge, M., 2016. Image style transfer using convolutional neural
networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition (pp. 2414-2423).
Gekas, J., and et.al., 2016. Non-invasive prenatal testing for fetal chromosome abnormalities:
review of clinical and ethical issues. The application of clinical genetics. 9. p.15.
Huang, G., and et.al., 2017, July. Densely connected convolutional networks. In CVPR (Vol. 1,
No. 2, p. 3).
Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education
India.
Newell, S. and Marabelli, M., 2015. Strategic opportunities (and challenges) of algorithmic
decision-making: A call for action on the long-term societal effects of ‘datification’. The
Journal of Strategic Information Systems. 24(1). pp.3-14.
Obar, J.A. and Wildman, S.S., 2015. Social media definition and the governance challenge-an
introduction to the special issue.
Patterson, P., Wilkins, L. and Painter, C., 2018. Media ethics: Issues and cases. Rowman &
Littlefield.
Vayena, E., and et.al., 2015. Ethical challenges of big data in public health. PLoS computational
biology. 11(2).
Xiang, Z., Magnini, V.P. and Fesenmaier, D.R., 2015. Information technology and consumer
behavior in travel and tourism: Insights from travel planning using the internet. Journal
of Retailing and Consumer Services. 22. pp.244-249.
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