The Role of Technology in Management

Companies and staff believe technology is to assist and create efficient business practices. As technology continues to advance, there are progressively fewer non-digital alternatives to the day-to-day activities that allows businesses to work competitively. Modern technology offers many effective tools and applications that managers can utilize when overseeing communication or managing and organizing staff workloads. With many of these business solutions, staff can train themselves through online workshops and FAQs, making implementation easier than ever before with minimal downtime and ultimately resulting in increased staff productivity.

Data analytics is the process of choosing relevant data with the aim of researching and making decisions on the basis of knowledge achieved. The quantity of knowledge a business has, determines the potential to aggregate and leverage for greater efficiency is staggering - market trends, consumer behaviour, demographics, retail sales, competitor pricing and more. Additionally, the event of Online Analytical Processing Systems (OLAP), like Oracle’s Express Server, has allowed easier access to look at and choose data to match it with other reports. Oracle software also can store and report payroll files for every employee, additionally to other HR operations. Data analysis is highly valuable in enterprise risk management (ERM). ERM can also help to spot missing opportunities during a work place or in departments where maintenance costs exceed profitability.

With numerous individuals performing from home offices now, keeping tabs on employees has become more complicated than simply peeking over the closest cubicle wall. Only with the utilization of technology, can management hope to possess an accurate barometer with which to take a live insight on the output produced by remote workers or satellite offices.

• ‘Time Doctor’ is one such example of a program being used to keep track of what exactly employees are performing and amount of time they spent on the tasks. Time Doctor is employed to manage attendance and improve productivity of a web workforce, to assist and ensure they become highly efficient.
• Another alternative is Toggle, a web time tracking tool, which is straightforward to line up and use. It integrates with project management tools like Basecamp and may be operated from anywhere with an access to internet. The ‘sharing tools’ option is also available for workers, to assist them to share their screen with managers in order to feature a visible aspect when explaining certain tasks. Tools like TeamViewer provide managers the power to raise and monitor the progress and therefore the efficiency of their staff.
• Other well-known methods for online collaboration include Jing Project. Real time monitoring tools like Jing Project can help to share screen and captures the video of the desktops which includes voiceovers or annotations to share information, an easy computer application that one needs to install.
• Google Drive is one of them, to share online spreadsheets to multiple individuals to retrieve simultaneously, an alternate to Excel or Word documents. There is wide use of Dropbox, the easy way to share and store documents which can be accessed by employees.
• The SharePoint by Microsoft is another secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from almost any device.

Project management encompasses a spread of aspects including budget and deadline management, tracking tasks, and streamlining communication. Teams, no matter where they are located, we have technologies available to arrange and monitor the lifecycle of various projects. To effectively use technology to manage projects, managers must have both the business experience to know processes and the technological training to acknowledge which program implementations will save time and money. The technology utilized in Basecamp, a web project management tool, has made it easier to manage projects and communication by optimizing workflow during a simplistic way. Managers can also send internal messages, have discussions through the app, and automate certain business processes which allows for a one-stop-shop in project management.

For today’s businesses, global competition is a topic of dialogue, and people who shall compete must be comfortable using communication technology in situations where physically meeting is not possible. With today’s technology, people can now speak face to face in real time, with a team of clients on the opposite side of the planet. Services like Skype or other video call systems help managers confine touch with remote workers over the web. These programs have made it possible for managers to possess a better personal relation with staff, instead of using previous methods like email or traditional phone calls. Other strategies for maintaining communication between employees include chat rooms, discussion groups & forums, and Google+ hangouts.

Managers now have a responsibility to implement the acceptable technologies to encourage collaboration, maximize efficiency, produce the simplest company results, and to direct employees in an appropriate way. In our modern business world, the sole thanks to steer a corporation toward success, goes to the knowledge and management of the technologies that contribute to this success and to locate potential pitfalls within that technology.