Characteristics
- Diffusion of e-governance on a large scale.
- The development of Information Technology has made education system simpler, easier, and widespread. Now, people of remote areas can also use technology for their children’s education and also avail the benefits of adult education.
- Development of remote areas.
- Fast economic development.
- Participation of public in governance and policy making.
- The judiciary and other administrative services can also take the help of technology to make work easier and faster.
- Technology helps the police in nabbing the criminals.
- Highly beneficial for the common people, as they can access their rights and can take legal action against the person who violates his/her rights.
- It increases the happiness and prosperity of not only an individual, but rather the society as a whole.
Digital proficiency
The business goals of IT are about leveraging information and technology to lower costs, improve operations and increase revenue. An IT organization with digital proficiency can devote more attention to what organizations really care about – leveraging information for gaining business insight and putting technology to business advantage. Businesses will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their multifaceted digital proficiency to scale up and shift from “doing digital” to “being digital.” A digital IT organization with high digital proficiency plays a crucial role in building a high-responsive, high-intelligent and high-mature digital business by interpreting business issues into technology-enabled solutions and leveraging necessary resources to solve well-defined business problems effectively.
IT is the lubricant to a well-designed business system; IT has to provide stability and operational excellence to “keep the business lights on.” IT needs to take the wise steps in doing consolidation, modernization, automation, integration and optimization for improving its overall digital maturity. IT management should be in the continuous tuning mode to streamline processes and tighten coordination and collaboration with the business partners. That requires IT management to make a serious amount of positive communication whilst continuously looking for the cost-efficient replacement of unstable or outdated processes.
Simplexity
People are complex, business is complex and the world is complex. Complexity is one of the emerging digital characteristics in the digital era. Imagine the complexity that comes in due to these characteristics such as less structure, more rules and regulations, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, lack of linearity and increased flux, etc. There are necessary complexity and unnecessary complication.
Innovativeness
To move up digital maturity, businesses are looking for IT to add new innovative methods for management of complexity, improving quality and driving digital transformation. The available digital technologies just make innovation easier to do now than in the past – less costly and more easily accessible. Innovation can be categorized as breakthrough innovation (push something to the new level), sustainable innovation (better version of products or services), efficiency innovation (process improvement), or “soft innovations” (communication or culture innovation). IT can drive all sort of innovation to improve business revenue growth and lift organizational maturity. There are few business units that are as deeply embedded into each corporate function as IT. Running innovative IT requires some kind of rethinking and reinventing the corporate processes and building the business capabilities for managing innovation systematically.
Emerging trends
Analytics
The field of analytics has grown many folds in recent years. Analytics is a process which helps in discovering the informational patterns with data. The field of analytics is a combination of statistics, computer programming and operations research.
- The field of analytics has shown growth in the field of data analytics, predictive analytics and social analytics.
- Data analytics is tool used to support decision-making process. It converts raw data into meaningful information.
- Predictive analytics is tool used to predict future events based on current and historical information.
- Social media analytics is tool used by companies to understand and accommodate customer needs.
Mobile Application
- Another emerging trend within information technology is mobile applications (software application on Smart phone, tablet, etc.)
- Mobile application or mobile app has become a success since its introduction. They are designed to run on Smartphone, tablets and other mobile devices. They are available as a download from various mobile operating systems like Apple, Blackberry, Nokia, etc. Some of the mobile app are available free where as some involve download cost. The revenue collected is shared between app distributor and app developer.
Cloud Computing
One of the most talked about concept in information technology is the cloud computing. Clouding computing is defined as utilization of computing services, i.e. software as well as hardware as a service over a network. Typically, this network is the internet.
Cloud computing offers 3 types of broad services mainly Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
- Cloud computing reduces IT infrastructure cost of the company.
- Cloud computing promotes the concept of virtualization, which enables server and storage device to be utilized across organization.
- Cloud computing makes maintenance of software and hardware easier as installation is not required on each end user’s computer.
User Interfaces
User interface has undergone a revolution since introduction of touch screen. The touch screen capability has revolutionized way end users interact with application. Touch screen enables the user to directly interact with what is displayed and also removes any intermediate hand-held device like the mouse.
Touch screen capability is utilized in smart phones, tablet, information kiosks and other information appliances.