Customers are no longer willing to go into profligate spending based on unsustainable credit. There have been many bankruptcies both personal and institutional. The darkened mood of the consumers makes them prefer saving to spending.

Unemployment has virtually depleted the reserves of disposable income that so defined the age of the boom and burst. This article aims to ask the question as to whether business intelligence should act as a reactive or even defensive mechanism to cope with fluctuating economic situations.

The sources of business intelligence can be both local and industry wide. Even internationally there are mechanisms to disseminate useful data about what has happened and what is likely to happen. Recessions and periods of austerity are not new to us. In the same way that a business can predict that sales are likely to pick up during the Christmas festivities, an economy can predict that where it is supported by vast amounts of dubious credit, the economy will fall at some stage.

Why is it then the people seemed to have been caught by surprise? The banking crisis’s that plagued the globe were talked about in the most awestruck tones as if people had never had of banks failing. Governments reacted with horror at the rising unemployment figures as if they had never had unemployment before.

The biggest victims were individuals and small businesses which generally do not have very sophisticated business intelligence systems but were never too big to fail. They did not have the ability to pressure governments into giving them crisis loans or bail-out money. All they did was to put up and if they went down, the entrepreneurs would wait and give it another go when the climate improved.

Does it have to be this way all the time? One would hope that many business people have learned the lessons of the global downturn and if it next happens (as it surely will), they are better prepared. Sadly history tells us that the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again.

Nevertheless even at this time of a recession firms can look at business intelligence as a means of mitigating some of the more devastating consequences of a difficult economy. For example some of the supermarkets have started offering quite a lot of budget in-house items which tend to cost much less than the branded items.

This was based on market intelligence gleaned from the buying patterns of their customers during the global recession. Credit card companies also scaled back on their lending criteria on the basis that their customer pool had an altered income and spending profile. That is the essence of using market intelligence to cope with market pressures.

Almost everyone is well aware of the fact that the IT is capable of making maintainable and sustainable competitive benefits. In the business arena, the IT is used through value chain of activities that facilitates the business organization to control and optimize the operational functions for effortless decision making process.

The IT is strategic in it’s skill by building the concept of “Value Chain” in a business o0rganization through generic value activities that are interdependent of each other. This chain comprises elements like customers, suppliers, finance, production, etc. There is a connection between these activities which makes it a value chain. These value chain activities as well as the product’s physical parts and processing is altered either by product differentiation or cutting the costs of the value activities. The IT on the whole even transforms the speed of competition.

The value of the company can be added by the IT either by increasing revenue or reduction in costs. The potential of the IT of adding value to the business firm is very different from being the source of the sustainable competitiveness.

Though, the IT’s ability to be a source of the sustainable competitive advantages is disputed and based on assumptions. The assumptions result in two theories. The correlation between IT and the sustainable competitive benefit is studied by one theory called as the Create capture and Keep paradigm. This basically relies on swapping the costs of the customers.

This theory got replaced by a resource based theory that explicates the company’s potential to use the IT to influence the basic resources as a plus and also source of the sustainable competitive edge. In this theory, when the company possesses similar resources or capability, which the other competitor company doesn’t posses, then the same constitutes as the source of the competitive edge.

But the problem is that, if the resources are constant, then it will be a great disadvantage at the cost of the company. So the same will not make a sustainable competitive edge. Simply by imitation of the IT resources of the successful company without social complexity or ambiguity might also make a sustainable competitive edge.

In any kind of organization, the IT is a potential source of competitive edge in these five methods given below:

• When the supplier is in a good position and the IT is essential and unique for the end users, then the costs borne by the consumers will be switched
• When a technology becomes a proprietary technology
• When the capital Investment in the IT enabled resource increases
• For building the IT application, some technical skills are needed
• When the managerial skills are developed for exploiting and understanding the IT application for increasing the business operations

Each and every kind of information in the firm can get positive results and has the potential to get sustainable competitive edge if you observe the following steps:

1. Assessing the potential and the existing information intensity of the process and product
2. Evaluating the probable impact of the IT on the firm
3. Identifying the rank of the activities that affects the IT first
4. Measuring how the IT can bring new business
5. Generating the action plan by taking advantages of IT

It is not just one supporting system, but also a perfect thought process contributing substantial edge, effects and the implications in the business goals.

However this view is rather old fashioned thinking. Agricultural enterprises can range from the small scale subsistence farms to large commercial firms that require huge investment and complex operations. Even for those that are presently small scale, it is advisable to consider up-scaling on the basis that the more technological advanced a farm is, the more likely it is to have large scale customers who pay well.

What then are the practical applications of technology in agriculture ?  The increased mechanization of agriculture means that computers and other technology can be used to either replace human activity in whole or to replace certain aspects of human activity or even to merely complement the other traditional methods of farming. At a time when farmers are encouraged to mechanize, thereby reaping the benefits of improved efficiency and adding value to their products, the role of InfoTech will increase in this sector. The equipment that is being used will become more efficient and will tie-in with the more modern farms.

Modern farms are not just about producing crops or rearing animals. They can have quite complex human resource systems, finance and operations. They would then resemble any other business and would likewise need similar Information Technology programs. Take for example a ranch owner who regularly supplies to major supermarkets; the ability to control stock and delivery times as well as the importance of ensuring consistent quality will mean that modern technology will be invaluable. The issues of finance, human resource management and even communication mean that the farm will have to have some form of business IT model. The level of sophistication will depend on the type of farm and the needs of the farmer.

The only downside is that the majority of farmers in the world come from the developing countries where they have very limited scope to grow. They tend to be subsistence farmers with extremely limited income. There is also the problem of lack of awareness and the fear of new technology. It is even doubtful whether such attempts to create technology within a basic industry are viable. The costs of creating a whole business information technology model may by far outweigh any returns that such a farm can realistically obtain.

En conclusion I would argue that agriculture has to behave like other industries if it is to experience the rapid development that those industries have experienced over the last three decades. The traditional methods of farming still have a role to play but in terms of getting really big returns, the only way is to modernize. This transformation will require InfoTech conceptualization and applications, and farmers ought to prepare themselves for this resource.

However there are dangers in this approach. If responsibility for business equity is shelved onto accountancy teams, other sections will not have an understanding of how their activities can lead to the diminishing or increase in business equity. Ideally everyone should understand their role in developing and maintaining business equity.

The role of individual employees
Individual employees will add value to the company by way of producing goods and service s for sale after mobilizing the inputs. Each person needs to take responsibility to ensure that they do their work to the best of their ability and to the specification that was given to them at the start of their contract. After all if the organization is to collapse, they will be the ones losing their jobs whilst trying to negotiate with unsympathetic venture capitalists. Where there is a need to appraise the company, local members of staff need to cooperate by providing accurate and timely management information in order to facilitate the quick award of funding to the firm.

The Role of the Corporate Finance Team
The corporate finance team is responsible for coordinating all efforts to obtain funding for business projects. Among these sources of funding will be business equity. They will need to assess that the company’s business equity levels are measured, quantified and documented. Furthermore they will be at the forefront of ensuring that in any business deal, the company business equity is not sold way below the market price.

They also need to raise management information for senior managers, prepare reports for potential investors and will be at the forefront of all negotiations. There is also an important role to sensitize the general workforce and senior managers about some aspects of accounting for business equity which may be relevant to their line of work.

The Role of Senior Management Executives
Senior executives will control the overall strategy of the company. If they are not versed with the basic concepts of business equity, they might make management decisions that are inappropriate in terms of trying to build a good business equity portfolio.

Management should also ensure that all parts of the business are aware of the existence of business equity and that all business functions are carried out bearing this in mind the need to maximize business equity. Finally they will be making the final decisions as to whether to agree to any investment proposal so it is imperative that they are quite well versed with the concepts of business equity.

Conclusion
As we can see from the above discussion, everyone working in an organization needs to ensure that they understand that business equity represents the value of their organization and that as they carry out each of their roles, they need to ensure that they consider the ramifications on this metric.

Human beings will be at the heart of any business IT project. They will be the working capital that ensures it is commissioned and at the end that it is used for the purpose for which it was commissioned. They will bring their own judgments, skills and failings to the project and could ultimately bring it down.

There is no way of controlling human influence in a comprehensive manner. What managers tend to do is to attempt influence employee action using the various management incentives and sanctions available to them. However this does not always work and could ultimately push the employees even further away from their managers. The basic tenets of good management practice can still apply here. Things such as supervision and reward schemes can counter some of the more negative reactions to new technology.

Where the project has been outsourced, the personnel issues are compounded by the fact the in-house managers really have very limited control on external staff. They will have entered binding contracts with their parent organizations and will really be free to do as they please. They also bring with them their own way of working that may not fit in with the company philosophy. Furthermore they do not bear direct responsibility for things when they go wrong and they have to use faulty technology. This means that they have even less incentive to get it right the first time.

This leads us on to the issue of accountability. This is particularly the case where there is a large organization with different people working on different projects all feeding into one big IT group. This can lead people to view themselves as separate parts of an entity leading to isolation and inconsistencies in practice. Even where problems are being resolved there is no one person who coordinates strategy. Any attempts to get some type of responsibility descend into a blame game. People start going off sick with stress and avoiding the senior managers.

However the biggest cause of failure has to be planning. Many failing organizations have a conceptual idea of what they would like out of their IT project but they will not have detailed plans as to how they are going to achieve the objectives. Commissioning will often be based on the personal whims of a particular manager rather than being an overall long term business strategy. Issues will be simplified with the attitude that they can deal with whatever problems arise on an adhoc basis. Therefore without proper planning the project is almost certainly doomed to fail.

There is a debate to be had about whether the government should be involved anyway. However the limits of this article do not allow for such extensive debate. Needless to say there is a general consensus that the Information Technology systems existing in many healthcare systems across the world are quite expensive and often do not meet the needs of the end users.

There have been various examples of government departments or private companies commissioning large business IT systems to administer healthcare only to later discover that these are either inappropriate or way over budget. The government sectors are particularly notorious for this. They get sold on by smooth sales people who juggle management speak for the benefit of bored managers.

Just to get an easy life, the IT system is commissioned anyway. This is despite some opposition from a lower ranked employee who, knowing how the business works on a day to day basis, will already have worked out that the new IT systems will not be able to deliver the kind of service that is required. When that employee begins to experience problems with the IT system, they are reprimanded for being resistant to change.

Once the complaints grow then the IT system is temporarily withdrawn until further investigation. Either the whole thing will be shelved or the company will join the vicious cycle of organizations that have to update or replace inappropriate technology systems.

This is the type of scenario that is played out like some tragedy over and over again. For some this is costly and unacceptable in such a sensitive industry that affects the personal lives of millions of people. Where it is government funded, this sort of business IT mismanagement takes resources away from other critical activities and reduces the scope of coverage when attempting to deliver healthcare services. What then is the solution for preventing such problems or dealing with them once they have overcome?

One of the more persuasive suggestions is that all stakeholders should be involved in selecting new information technology. There will be a divergence of need between a clinician, an administrator, a senior manager and a patient. Even the IT technician will have their own perspective as to what needs to work. Rather than selectively consult with just one among the many groups, it is far better to consult with them all. It might take a bit longer than would normally be required but the end result is that healthcare IT systems will be durable and appropriate to the people who use them.