IT Systems Increasing Employee Productivity

In organizations, the best way to increase employee productivity is to have well designed IT infrastructure (information technology) that supports your employees when they are performing their daily tasks. Some of the IT infrastructure systems available to companies are client-server networks, internet, n-tier infrastructures, backup/recovery strategies, and a disaster recovery plan. Some of the ways that employees can access company information is through the intranet, extranet, portals and digital dashboards. The infrastructure and access to the information make up the IT systems. There are seven key ways that the IT systems can increase your employee’s productivity. These seven factors are availability, accessibility, reliability, scalability, flexibility, performance, and capacity planning.

1. Availability of your IT systems is usually determined when your employees need to use the system. Therefore, the manager needs to take into consideration the employees who work late, on weekends, and those in different time zones.
2. Accessibility of your IT systems is deciding who has the right to use company information and how they are able to use it. Managers need to take into consideration the type of information that can be accessed while your employee is using the IT system. This kind of information could be payroll, bonus or health related. Managers who implement the systems also need to be aware if the information on the system can be “created, read, updated or deleted, which is referred to as CRUD in the technology world" (Cummings et al. 168).
3. Scalability of your IT systems “is a characteristic of a system that indicates how much it can grow, or scale, as the organization and information needs grow" (Cummings et al. 168). IT systems should be able to support your growing business, and should not run into such problems as running out of memory, and transaction performance speed slowing down.
4. Flexibility of your IT systems refers to the amount of tools you have included on your system upon installation, or the ability of the system has to be updated. Managers need to take into consideration the expansion of the company. If it is going to expand into foreign markets you must take into consideration such things as if the IT system supports the language of the new market.
5. Performance of your IT system is “how quickly it can perform a certain process. A benchmark is a set of conditions used to measure how well a product or system functions" (Cummings et al. 169). Managers must be aware of potential growth in the IT system. They must make sure that increased growth does not slow down transaction processing.
6. Capacity Planning of your IT “system determines the future IT infrastructure requirements for new equipment and additional network capacity" (Cummings et al. 169). When implementing your IT system, make sure that your system is upgradeable to allow for future growth within the company.