Information Communication Technology Essay

Information Communication technology is considered as the drivers for competitiveness, innovation and change in our modern economy. ICT is changing our lives – the way we socialize, work, shop, search for information, and communicate. The evidence available shows that many people in Africa are now connected to the internet and the number is increasing at tremendous rate.SMEs inherently faces Market access constraints which includes; poor quality products, lack of knowledge to explore niche markets, limited resources to promote their products and poor market research. While considering these, ICT can improve market access by facilitating communication with customers, competitive positioning, enable information acquisition and production of quality

Users, frustrated with the high cost and time commitment involved in traditional development strategies. Many of the information systems design projects in the backlog, they feel, are critical to achieving a competitive advantage by providing better service to customers, by offering new products and services, and by developing better internal information about products, customers and suppliers.

Lee et al,(1983) cited three factors to consider in evaluating projects that are candidates for development using one of these approaches. Commonality, impact, and structure (Lee et al, 1983). Commonality means the extent to which other organizations could use the system’s solution to the problem, the more widespread the impact and the more important an information system is, the greater the demand for involving information systems professionals. If a company is planning to develop a national network tying its customers to its order entry system, for example, the major impact of this project on customer service and sales would dictate professional miss-involvement. They further defined it, as a measure of how well the problem and its solution are

For example, to communicate with clients, sales forces in the field are supplemented by interactive web sites and call centres. In addition, advanced database technology, world-wide web integration, sales force automation and multi-media-basedfront office applications are emerging as key elements of CRM. Evidence from surveysof managers and case study literature shows that the most important reasons for investingin ICT are product quality improvements, especially customer service, timeliness, and convenience (Bresnahanet.al.,