THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN TODAY’S ECONOMY
IT is driving a new economy today, the advances in new software, hardware and connectivity can provide unprecedented benefits to business and individuals today around the world. Also the economies trend affect IT spending levels, in the last decade most business give a high priority to IT budget in good or bag times. And the reason is simple, during periods of growth; companies can’t afford to lag behind the IT curve. In contrast, when the economy slows down, companies often use IT to reduce cost and improved efficiency.
The World Wide Web or Internet, electronic commerce, free markets, the stock market, and the massive ingenuity all around the world created threats in combination with new opportunities. An organization has to take advantages of new technologies, responding both to the threats and opportunities in the same way. Furthermore, organizations that fail to understand how models of strategy affects a new economy subjugate by Internet are unlikely to survive the 21st century.
IT provide extraordinary opportunities for increasing precision, accuracy and rapidity of decision made by managers withing the organization.
BOWEN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT RECORD SYSTEM
In the currents system at the Student Administration in Bowen high school (BHSERS), I identified problems of inconsistency, redundancy, incomplete not standards formats of the information in the system. Consequently this makes the analysis process of the information more difficult. Also there is the technical problem of maintaining 3 software packages all the time to be able to record, store and access the information needed Also because of this technical problems we can say that the operational and maintenance cost of this system could be hard to keep within the school budget.
Additionally to this each system that the school manage runs independent of each other and there is not functional integration between the different systems and areas within the school. At the same time there is not accurate data exchange between them.
The current system definitely doesn’t meet the performance required for the fast growing student’s population in the Bowen area. Moreover to carry out auditing of school activities, require from education authority is a very complicated task because of the inconsistency of the information.
Information about the BHSSRS to develop a detailed understanding of the current system
To understand the current system we need to know about the background and the problem with the current system. For example:
Background: The school has three major sections, the Student Administration section (SA), the Management and Finance (MF) section and the Human Resources (HR) section. The Student Record System falls under the responsibilities of the SA section.
Although all school sections handle related information there is at present no common system to integrate this information. Instead, each section has its own little unique system.
Problems with the current system:
Since data is stored in MS-Access, MS-Excel and MS-Word, they are not in a standardised format. Therefore they cannot be shared easily and as well it is difficult to do any analysis on it to filter out useful information. Since data is recorded in different formats, the information that is stored is inconsistent, incomplete and in many cases duplicated. There is also the technical problem of maintaining three software packages all the time to be able to continue to record, store and access the information needed. The data stored and used in the current Student Administration system for instance data on teachers, classroom allocation, amount of student fees paid are also needed by other sections of the administration but because there is no one integrated system, they are duplicated. So not only is there duplication of data within the current Student Administration system but there is also duplication in the storage of data across all three current administration systems.
Since data stored is not in standardised form, is incomplete, inconsistent and duplicated it is difficult to carry out an auditing of school activities – which is a requirement from the local/regional education authority.
