The Ucla Business And Information Technologies (Bit) Survey —Year 2

The UCLA Business and Information Technologies (BIT) Survey is aimed at understanding and tracking the impacts of technologies on business practices. This report presents the results of the second survey conducted in the US in 2004–2005.The subject group of the survey consisted of organizations and sub organizations that make independent decisions with respect to the acquisition, implementation and the use of new technologies. The survey was sent to chief information officers and senior information systems managers as these individuals are most likely to be able to respond to the survey.The survey addressed a wide range of business practices, including technology adoption, internal organization transformations, market facing activity, supplier and vendor relationships, and business results and performance consequences from the application of new technologies. Globalization and outsourcing/offshoring were also included.The survey results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” examples which are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.Some of the key results of the survey were as follows:• The internal organization of companies is changing significantly in terms of both structure and workforce. Organizations are becoming flatter, with a wider span of control, more geographically distributed, and more “virtual”. Teleconferencingteleconferencing is increasing, telecommuting is not as widely accepted.• The workplace and work requirements are changing. Many employees face screens, many are being monitored for performance. Technical capabilities are becoming necessary. Executives are asking for more and better structured information.• The degree to which outsourcing and off shoring are being pursued is still limited. IT services, payroll and market research continue to be the more widely outsourced business functions. Outsourcing is not considered to be causing workforce reductions.• The technologies and systems that are the most widely adopted are wireless hardware and software and e-commerce tools and websites.• Radio frequency identification (RFID) and identity management solutions are not being widely adopted at this time. However, many firms plan to purchase them in the near future, indicating that the interest in security is going up.• Organizations are using multiple touch points for customer relationship management (CRM). These include online, mail, face-to-face and phone.• Companies are collecting more data with online technologies. However, the use of this data for customer view integration is not as prevalent for marketing yet.• The adoption of on-line sales has not as yet had a major impact on marketing strategy. In particular, there has not been a significant change in branding or positioning (across all respondents). However, there is substantial interest in having customers perform more self-service tasks while purchasing online.• Technology adoption has caused internal communication costs and production costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and implementation, and of consultancy and collaboration have predictably increased.The most striking outcome of the survey is perhaps the organizational impact. It is clear that work life at the level of the individual, as well as firmwide organizational structures are changing. It is also clear that certain technologies and capabilities have been very widely adopted, e-commerce and active websites for internal and external communications are the most widespread. At the same time, there are some rather negative results: organizations do not say that they have expanded their reach on the market side very dramatically. The adoption of hardware-based technologies such as biometry and RFID appears to be slower than the software and communications side.We note that since the survey is across all industry sectors, some finer analysis may reveal important local differences. This work is under way. In addition, the firm level surveys do not easily reveal sector level changes. Industry and sector studies that are being conducted by us and our research partners will help to understand those issues better.This is the second survey in a series of surveys to understand the impacts of technologies on business practices. By comparing the results for the two years, we find that most patterns continue to remain the same. This shows the validity of the survey findings. Some trends that are emerging include the following:• Some technologies that are beginning to emerge as the technologies for the future include wireless software and hardware, RFID and collaboration portal tools. ERP also continues to be popular for deployment in the near term.• Continued investment of technology budgets into security hardware and software is observed. Although off shoring/business process outsourcing continues to be lower in the list of company technology budgets, it is seen to have an increasing trend.• Outsourcing of IT services is increasing. Outsourcing is also not seen as the reason for reduction in jobs.• The trend is towards the automation of all CRM functions. Partner relationship functions are also becoming more automated as supported by the strong increase in the adoption of e-payments and e-procurement.•Technology is seen to be helping organizations understand their customers better in all strategic areas. However, although more data is collected with automation, businesses are not yet integrating the customer view significantly.• Globalization is not seen to a great extent. However, the trend is towards increasing globalization to the Asian regions.