Modern IT Industry Practices

Downsizing

Downsizing is a type of strategy mainly used by organizations to cut costs during times of hardship. It involves removing certain employees from the organization. Downsizing ' strategies in general first focus on removing non-essential employees, contract workers and so on until all surplus labor is removed from the organization.

Downsizing could be directed to particular organizational functional departments (accounts), staff levels (line managers) or business units (product A).

Advantages of downsizing

• The organization can remove all unnecessary workers and thus cut down on a great ProPortion of total costs.
• Gives rise to a more linear and focused form of operations.

Disadvantages of downsizing

• The organization may have to incur a large sum of money as redundancy PaYments.
• Skilled employees may expect redundancies and leave for other organizations'
• Gives rise to a situation of employee instability'
• Motivation levels maY droP.

De-layering

De-layering is a specific form type of downsizing which is directed towards removing specific structural levels from an organization. The main benefit of this strategy is the large cost saving brought about by laying off expensive administrative staff. The exercise however is criticized since it overloads work and creates uncertainty in the minds of the remaining staff .

Home based work / Teleworking

Home based work is a recent (since the 90s) work pattern which is being increasingly accepted in almost all countries around the world. Brought about by the development of modern technology such as developments in computer systems, communication networks and the internet, it is now possible for several job functions to be performed by individuals without even having to leave their homes.

The system usually works by sending individuals work assignments by e-mail or over corporate VPNs" The work could then be done at the individuals convenience and once completed submitted back to the office via either e-mail, a VPN or similar

Home based work is becoming increasingly popular in professions such as information systems, software development, accounting and similar consulting services.

The advantages being savings in costs such as those associated with transport, office space, etc. However the system is criticized saying that it promotes inefficiencies, delays.
etc.

Data warehousing
Data warehousing is a recent business IS concept that is concerned with maintaining large corporate repositories (banks) of historic information. The information stored could then be used as input for MIS (management information systems) functions such as trend analysis. It is also possible to drill down through these data items to find detailed information which is relevant to a particular topic of interest.

eg : Corporate data warehouses of MNCs.

Data mining

Data mining is another topic of recent interest that emerged in parallel to the concept of data warehousing. Data mining uses a data warehouse as a data source and then enables extraction of data from the data warehouse, which could then be used to aid decision makers. It is often also defined as a tool for MIS and EIS systems' .,

The following is an illustration of the function of data mining'