Information Technology and Its Effect on The Quality of People’s Personal, Social and Business Lives

Introduction

Information technology has made a significant impact with tremendous pace in the last few years. Either with the invention of the telephone or the internet, with each passing day, technology finds its way to development. The revolution in information technology has changed in almost every sector, it has made various positive and negative changes, whether it is personal lives, business, or social lives. These three points are one of the most important sides of a human's life. The consequences of information technology on the standard of people’s personal, social and business lives will be discussed in this report.

Discussion

Positive impacts

Technology plays a vital role in boosting business by promoting its business on the internet, on the media and on many other platforms that technology has generated. Information systems can help companies to expand their business by opening more branches or wider coverage in different countries faster and connect with them only with the help of technology. Connections between branches are more efficient using information systems.

The technology incorporates various new strategies to encourage businesses, whether it is a small business or a high-level enterprise. These companies generate large profits from these methods of promoting their business. Before businesses should have their store in every place where they sold their goods and services. But nowadays technology makes work in offices simpler than ever. One person can handle the work with the help of technology that was being handled by two to three workers. This is one of the advantages of business profit. For example, Postmates receive customer's orders on their smartphone and Postmates offers the courier to pick up the customer order and deliver it. Postmates doesn’t have to have a lot of employees to do the business.

The information system is the economy and accuracy. The information system has played a main role in decreasing the expenses of people and increasing accuracy and efficiency in their work. Compared to ancient times people save their time and money now using information systems. For example, if we need goods and services we can order online and we can save our time and travel expenses. Nowadays, delivery service companies are very common such as Uber, Easi, etc. UberEats uses information systems to make efficiency in people’s lives. In the UberEats app, customers can see all the restaurant’s menu that has been a partner with uber, not only that the order and payment can be done in the app.

The data on information systems can help people’s lives. All the data about individuals can be kept safe in the information system. It can be used to help the government or any other importance. Such as, the hospital can track their patients’ records and help them to solve the problems faster. For example, in December 2013, the Ebola virus began to spread in the West African nation of Genea and then spread to the neighboring countries. In those days, IBM’s research lab in America (www.research.ibm.com/labs/africa) created a system that can enable citizens to engage directly with government agencies. The system shows information about governments and aid agencies to stop the spread of the virus. IBM's software can integrate other data, such as hospital reports, flight information, media reports and it integrated open data from governments to help to slow the spread of Ebola and reducing the number of deaths.

Social media is rising daily. The more advanced the information technology the more advanced social media production is. Information technology is a major part of social media. There is a startup called Bajo. Bajo has developed the software as an engine for event detection. This software is used for the events of social media. Bajo could be meeting around 1.2 billion social media users. Not only does Banjo provide updates on events, but it also provides a real-time source of all user posts of images, videos, and comments. It gives benefits to allow people to communicate and know information from different parts of the world. Someone can find a long-lost friend through a social networking site, enabling them to reconnect.

Not only that, social media will change the social lives of people. Using social media, people can easily have more connexions. Nguyen Duc Haur, from nobody to somebody. He is an actor who once was a peasant, he rose to fame. The other example is JVevermind. He is posting short videos on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram. That is how JVevermind as a comedian builds his audience and has more than 1.5 million subscribers on his Youtube Channel.

Negative impacts

On the other hand, information technologies could go too far when it is used by businesses to promote their services and products. The more advanced technology becomes, the more it seems to have control over our lives. The lack of people's awareness of permitting companies to detect people's track on the internet. As the data (Rainer K & Prince, 2019) the companies that used persuasive technologies learned about the customer's behavior. There is a slight gap between persuasion and manipulation. The companies are trying to control customers by doing something or buying something useless for them. For instance, the GSN game (www.gsn.com) is a company that makes mobile games such as poker and bingo. The company takes players’ data every day. The data can give information about the players’ behavior. GSN can simply track the customer's preferences and customize it. GSN can predict customer’s interest and suggest other games or can offer in-game purchases.

Technology has led to increased competition for various business sectors and many new companies are now entering the internet daily. In turn, the increasing number of online companies has resulted in a customer retention problem and an increased risk of being forced out of business by disruptive big business. The small business that has a small amount of money will be more difficult to compete with than other big companies.

Some companies use information systems to advance their businesses. On the other hand, it can be detrimental to customers such as personalized pricing. According to Rainer K & Prince (2019), personalized pricing is the practice of pricing items to some extent determined by a specific customer’s perceived ability to pay. With e-commerce, merchants can change their prices based on their customers very easily. The merchant can change in the system in real-time. Some companies are using personalized pricing. For instance, Delta Airlines (www.delta.com) uses personalized pricing. These companies look for the customers that use this airline frequently and raise the ticket prices. Frequent flyers probably still buy it because they need to travel for business trips. Not only Delta Airlines, In 2000, Amazon (www.amazon.com) was also found using personalized pricing. It is not fair because the company charged its regular customers at higher prices based on the customer’s shopping history.

Technological improvement will cause a huge impact on business lives and this would make way for cybercrime. Companies that rely on information systems can get hacked by hackers and their information gets leaked. For example, in 2006 Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (www.hollywoodpresbyterian.com) got attacked by a cyber attacker. It caused records to leak out from the hospital. The attackers had requested a ransom of $3 million. The hackers locked up patient details and test reports for 10 days before they were paid $17,000 by the hospital to decrypt their key information. This is one of the consequences if companies relying on an information system.

Not just in business lives, cybercrime can happen in social lives too. As information technology continues to advance, technology could process personal and private information. People can also look at other users' personal information which would include vital information such as age, sex, and marital status to learn more about the individual. In the social media era, if the personal information gets leaked it can be a huge disaster. Personal information can be spread very fast and it can not be erased. It can affect society to excommunicate people.

Social networks represent an extension of ourselves. Communication takes place during the interaction, and our need to be linked and to communicate with others is fundamental and inevitable. Social media's likes are something that makes people feel good. When people see other's social media, People compare themselves to other’s feelings, strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and perspectives. Communication using technology can make the skill of communication in 'real-life' decrease.

Conclusion

Therefore, the Information system has both positive as well as negative impacts on people's personal, business and social lives. As mentioned above, the information system has promoted the quality of people's personal, business and social lives by decreasing expenses and increasing accuracy, helps to cover wider areas and aware people what is right and what is wrong in society respectively. But on the other side misuse of the Information system has harmed people's personal, business and social lives.

Recommendations

The information system has played important roles to promote people's personal, business and social life. But to some extent, it has its disadvantages which put negative impacts on people's personal, business and social lives. Some businesses are using information systems in the wrong way to promote their products such as persuasion and manipulation as discussed in the above paragraph. This type of activity done by businesses should be controlled so that customers can save their money. It is very important to identify the causes of problems created by the information system and finding the best alternatives for respective problems to promote people's personal, business and social lives.

References

• Rainer, K & Prince, B 2019a, It’s about business 7.4, Introduction to information systems: supporting and transforming business, 7th edition, Australia and New Zealand edition., Wiley, Milton, Qld, pp. 206–207.
• Rainer, K & Prince, B 2019b, Chapter 11 opening case, Introduction to information systems: supporting and transforming business, 7th edition, Australia and New Zealand edition., Wiley, Milton, Qld, pp. 307–308.
• Rainer, K & Prince, B 2019b, It’s about business 8.1, Introduction to information systems: supporting and transforming business, 7th edition, Australia and New Zealand edition., Wiley, Milton, Qld , pp. 223–224.
• Rainer, RK & Prince, B 2016a, Banjo organizes the world’s social media, Introduction to information systems : supporting and transforming business, 7th edn, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, p. 256
• Rainer, RK & Prince, B 2016a, New delivery services use information technology, Introduction to information systems : supporting and transforming business, 7th edn, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 3–4,
• Rainer, RK & Prince, B 2016b, Combining big data to fight Ebola, Introduction to information systems : supporting and transforming business, 7th edn, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, p. 133
• Rainer, RK & Prince, B 2016b, Ransomware, Introduction to information systems : supporting and transforming business, 7th edn, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, p. 97
• Rainer, RK & Prince, B 2016c, Smartphones drive growth of ecommerce in Vietnam, Introduction to information systems : supporting and transforming business, 7th edn, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 223–224