ICT Supporting Organisations 6: Capacity

Another word you hear when people talk about ICT is capacity. What is it and what are its implications?

Capacity is something everyone tries to increase in their working lives. It means being more productive, doing more things – and hopefully in less time than they previously took to do!

One of the major reasons that organizations adopted ICT – or simply “computers” as it was generally called at the time was that magic word – PROFIT! As time has gone on, most companies, small and large, have increased their ICT capacity. This then allows their employees themselves to increase their own capacity – in other words to increase their productivity. This, to put it bluntly, means to do more work (even though it may not feel like it, but generally it does!).

There were several major factors in the decision to adopt these new fangled computers:

• It would reduce the amount of people needed to work for an organization. Traditionally, wages can take up a huge amount of a company’s turnover.
• It would reduce the amount of time needed to perform certain operations. In other words, it was envisaged that more things could be done in less time.
• Less human error would mean that the quality of goods would increase – or at the very least not decline

All this adds up to saving money. Even if an organization’s profits did not increase in their own right, by reducing costs in other ways then the overall profit could increase.

This takes great care on behalf of the company (something we will look in to later).

But how does ICT allow an individual WORKER to be more productive?

In parts three and four we looked at a variety of professions that have seen change since the increase of ICT in the workplace. We have seen how the skills needed may have changed since then. How, though, does ICT enable these professionals to increase their capacity. How, then, does it make them more productive?

Teacher/Trainer

Although more time generally goes in to the preparation of what are called Learning Materials, most teachers and trainers will admit (some grudgingly) that ICT has enabled them to be a lot more productive.

Although time must be taken to, for example, produce a lesson or training session that will need an interactive PowerPoint presentation, this can be used again and again. Moreover, if these are shared among other teaching or training colleagues who are themselves producing lessons of this nature then these materials can be disseminated and shared.

Time consuming activities, such as printing up worksheets and assignment are also becoming a thing of the past. Learning materials can be placed on a VLE (see previous parts) for learners to print out at their leisure, or reprint if they have lost their originals.

Software training manuals, which can be updated when the software it describes is updated, can be used to allow learners to work more independently of the teacher or trainer, freeing up time to allow the professional to concentrate a little more on some of the students who may otherwise fall behind.

Designer

In the past, when designs were put on to paper, a single part of the design that had to be changed could mean that the entire design would have to be redrawn from scratch.

Now, with Computer Aided Design, only the part of the design that needs changing has to be changed, with time freed up for the designer and their team to move forward with the project as a whole or begin work on a completely different piece of work.

Administrator

Imagine if an Administrator was asked to write a letter to a thousand people. They would immediately start planning to create a single word processed document, with the main elements of the letter as its contents.

Then, each letter could be “tweaked” – in other words changed slightly to suit each individual recipient. This could be done one by one, which is in itself time consuming – yawn! However, if the Administrator is sufficiently skilled up, they would be aware that a function called Mail Merge exists. This enable one set of information – for example a letter – to be merged with another – in this case it could be the names and addresses of the recipients held in a database.

In the past, if these letters were to be personalized at all they would each have to be typed out individually. Imagine the time that would take!

And there’s more! What if the company had thousands of customers, the details of whom were filed away neatly in – uh oh – filing cabinets! The Administrator could be asked to write a letter ONLY to customers over a certain age that lived in a certain area.

Would you like to have been the person who had to dig out all those dusty paper records? Thought not! Now, with a customer database it would be quite straightforward to create a query that would capture this information from the database and use that. Click, drag, click – okay!

So, ICT in general means that people can increase their work capacity.

Think of some of the other jobs that have existed since before computers. Can you think of the advantages that using ICT has brought?

There are – of course – disadvantages too! But that is another story!

Next: Trends in ICT