13.1 The developing role of information technology

Walk into almost any business today and you will see a computer on every desk. The senior managers who now start the day by logging-on to their email account are the same people who once proudly declared that they could not operate a keyboard. In part, this change has come about through education and new attitudes to technology, but the main driver of change on the desktop is the increasing standardization, accessibility and power of graphical interfaces and the easy availability of applications for communications, word-processing and other common business tasks. It simply does not make sense for managers to ask a secretary to print out their email when they can read it for themselves on the screen.

Communication within organizations, by email and through the corporate Intranet, is now much richer and often more democratic than in the past. Email has become the communication medium of choice in a world of global business where managers are constantly on the move between different time zones.

Radical change has also occurred behind the scenes in the corporate data centres of large organizations and in the computer rooms of smaller ones. Again the story is one of technology power and standardization. De facto standards created by the leading proprietary technology vendors rest upon more fundamental international standards such as the hypertext transfer protocol that forms the basis for the World Wide Web. With a little encouragement from fears of the so-called “millennium bug”, many organizations abandoned their old