Page 61 - Introduction to Business

CHAPTER 1 What Is Business? 35

The Digital Era

LEARNING OBJECTIVE 10
Evaluate the impact of the digital revolution on global businesses, governments, and societies.

What is the digital era? Innovations in information technology (IT—computers, digital era The period of transformation
software, telecommunications, and the Internet) are radically changing the way within our lifestyle to make the Internet
and related technologies a part of our
people live, communicate, and work. You have probably noticed that essentially everyday lives
everything we do in our daily lives, at home, at school, at play, and at work, is going
through fundamental change. This period of transformation—adjusting our
lifestyle to make the Internet and related technologies a part of our everyday lives—
is called the digital era. While some of us like a slow pace of change, today’s realities
are different. New information technologies, of which the Internet is by far the most
publicly visible form, are turning the world upside down as access to the technol-
ogy spreads rapidly around the globe. The capacity and speed of communications
networks has increased tremendously. As bandwidth (the amount of data and other bandwidth The amount of data and
information that can be transferred in a second over the Internet) expands and as other information that can be
transferred in a second via the Internet
communications costs fall, more and more computers (and people) will be linked
together. The benefits of online communication will increase exponentially with
the number of such connections. Increasingly, as networks take hold, they will
reshape the way people (all over the world) live, entertain, communicate, and work.
The fact is, those same technological changes that are transforming the business
world now will also revolutionize the way government does its business, as well as
the nature of our public life.

E-Business

To understand why and how organizations in our economic system will be pro-
foundly affected by the IT revolution, it is useful first to examine the enormous
impact of the digital economy on business.

Women, even in villages of many
developing countries, use the cell
phone to determine current market
price and demand for their prod-
ucts. Transacting small business
with traders in metropolitan cities
via the phone, these women can
save valuable time and money by
not commuting through traffic.

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