Management Online REview

6 January 2009 | Home

ISSN 1996-3300

Information Technology

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Business Process Outsourcing and India

Sumitro Mukherjee

This article explores the recent boom in business process outsourcing, spurred on by the rapid development of information technology. India is a major destination for BPO and provides a case study of strengths and weaknesses for its future in this field. Business Process Outsourcing is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization’s critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications. Outsourcing, Offshore-Outsourcing and Offshoring are used interchangeably despite important technical differences. Outsourcing involves the transfer of organizational function to a third party; when the third party is located in another country it is called Offshore-Outsourcing; whereas offshoring represents the transfer of an organizational function to another country, regardless of whether the work stays in the corporation or not. Outsourcing and offshoring are not new concepts to the global economy. Earlier, offshoring was mostly restricted to manufacturing through technology-transfer during the maturity and decline phases of product life cycle. Major advantages of outsourcing are cost-reduction, comparative advantage by division of labour and economies of scale, lower turn-around time, and data-backup for disaster management. Areas of concern are service quality, data-theft, attrition rate, privacy laws and personal-information misuse and credit-card frauds. There are other issues also like job-losses in the outsourcing country, cultural differences and information security. The Indian outsourcing industry, a fast growing and major investment area, should benefit from an impetus in coming years due to its increased focus on information security and a comprehensive IT Act.

The Use of Information Technology to Create a Better Workplace for Individuals with Disabilities

Rachel F Adler

Linda Weiser Friedman

Hershey H Friedman

Computer and information technology has made it increasingly easy for disabled people to join the workforce. This paper describes how computer technology can play a role in accomplishing this goal and it examines new and existing technology that can be used to accommodate individuals with particular disabilities, specifically, visual impairment, hearing impairment, speech impairment, learning disabilities, autism, mobility impairment, the elderly, and those with mental health problems - in many cases, promising examples of possible future assistive technology are presented. The disabilities market consists of 750,000,000 people worldwide and is growing rapidly. About 20% of the population of the Unites States is disabled; 25% of the population of the European Union is disabled. Moreover, every demographer is predicting that there will be huge labor shortages in many countries in the near future. It is crucial for firms to find ways to hire more disabled employees since, for one thing, they can be the engine for generating and developing new product ideas for this important group. The diversity we seek to achieve in the workplace includes not only gender and ethnic background, but disability as well.

High Impact Areas of the New Media Technologies: A Review

Linda Weiser Friedman

Hershey H Friedman

The new media technologies encompass an extensive variety of web-related communication tools, such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media forms. Organizations that wish to thrive in the Internet Age must understand the sea changes taking place thanks to the new media. Indeed, business, society, government, education and virtually every institution has been affected. This paper will review the new media phenomenon by examining the various application areas that have been dramatically impacted by the new media technologies. These high impact areas demonstrate how the new media are important for organizations that wish to make their mark in the 21st century.

Online Complaint Management at Swisscom: A Case Study

Alexandra Daniela Zaugg

To date, online complaint management has received only limited attention from scholars and practitioners, although it is expected to change because this new way of feedback management can offer considerable advantage for business. To have a first insight into Swiss (online) complaint management, a case study with a major Swiss telecommunications company, Swisscom, was conducted. This article explores how complaint management, and in particular online complaint management, is used in this company.

Against the Tyranny of PowerPoint: Making the Technology Work for Us

Yiannis Gabriel

PowerPoint is a powerful piece of communication technology that has had profound consequences on presentations (business and educational), classroom communication and, possibly, on the nature of learning itself. An analysis of the ways in which PowerPoint is used offers considerable insights into, first, the nature of educational technologies and their organizational implementations, second, the effect of these technologies on the construction and dissemination of organizational knowledge, and, third, on the qualities and skills of a society of spectacle, where a great deal of organizational knowledge assumes the form of visual representations. Potential short-comings of PowerPoint include the parcelling of knowledge into bullet-points, reliance on visual aids to support weak analysis and the forced linearity of argumentation that limits improvisation, digression and inventivesness. The author, however, argues that PowerPoint can be used more creatively, to build on our culture’s emphasis on spectacle and image and related multi-tasking skills that lecturers and students develop. In this manner, PowerPoint can redefine the nature of a lecture, from the authoritative presentation of a text into a multi-media performance that elicits a critical, creative and active response from its audience.

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