The ever increasing range of ICT technology has enabled workers to become more productive and change their working styles. The work/life balance has been shifted as ICT has made it possible to still be work productive at home and on the move.
As many jobs nowadays involve the use of a computer, ICT has become ever more important in the work place. Due to more ICT being involved in the work place this has changed the description of many jobs. For example accountants used to use calculators and pencils, they now use spreadsheet packages such as Excel to complete most of their work. Also most office staff must now be competent in basic work processing and email applications on a computer.
Office Working Styles
Before ICT impacted the working people, typing tasks were performed by separate employees. Companies would employ typists who would receive letters or other documents in written form and then would type them up using a typewriter. Nowadays, these letters and documents are typed on a computer using a word processor by the worker who needs to do them. This makes workers life much easier as you are able make any changes quickly and effectively without having to type out the whole document again. This is just one way in which ICT has made the worker have a more efficient use of time.
ICT technological advancements has meant a lot of jobs for example Typists and filing clerks have largely become redundant.This is a problem as many people have lost jobs and have no income due to technology taking their place. Many people have had to retrain to have a ICT based skill they can use in the work place, this is because there is no more demand for their old jobs anymore. Among these jobs that have been created are Data Entry Clerks, Database Administrators and IT Support Staff.
ICT has completely changed the way in which we buy our groceries and visit the supermarket. Shop/Supermarket assistants use compterised till sytems (EPOS), and payment systems (EFTPOS). EPOS is an electronic point of sale. An EPOS is a system that uses computers or specialised terminals that can be combined with other hardware, such as barcode readers, cash draws etc for accurately and instantly capturing the sale / transaction and take the item you have purchased off the supermarket/shops inventory. This is a complete contrast to what supermarket or shop assistants used to have to do when someone bought something from their store. Not so long ago till assistants had to type the price off every item. Workers in the store had to make sure every item had a price lablel. Nowadays Barcode readers that use EPOS technolgy, allow the till assistants to just simply scan the item that the cusotmer has bought and a price will appear on the electronic display infront of them. This saves a lot of time and tedious work that employees in supermarkets and shops had to do.
People also use ICT to become more productive and self reliant at and away from work. This has caused people to spend more time working, breeching the gap between life away from the office and life at it. Not so long ago people had would do a normal day at work and not work much away from the office. Nowadays PDA's(personal digital assistants) and Blackberry's allow people to stay in touch with work life away from the office. Blackberry's offer a feature called 'push email' which allows people to have access to their emails on the go. This is handy as work emails can be accessed on the phone and therefore people can stay work busy even in their spare time. This has made people far more productive for their business. Then downside to this amazing technological adavancement is the invasion of work in their personal life. Blackberries and PDA's have meant poeple are spending more and more time working away from the office. This means the people are spending less time with friendsand family even though these are the people who are more important in their lives.
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This is a screenshot of a blackberry screen showing emails received by the phone |
Video conferencing is another feature that has allowed business colleagues to share and discuss their work. This allows work to still continue away from the office in real time, in which they can see eachother regardless of how far apart the colleages are from one another. Journalists no longer use shorthand, our dictate the story through a phone to file a report, but instead they use computing software and portable laptops with a modem to connect them to their office regardless of where they are in the world. This allows journalists to publish reports much quicker and get up to date news that is broadcast all over the world. In the past, news stories would take a long time to build as reports were written by hand and had to be sent to their office. This would take a considerable length of time especially if the report was comming from somewhere half way arround the world.
Include video- The use of Bighands in the office environemnt. Video someone dictating a letter.
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